#SYNCTERM DIAL UP HOW TO#
#SYNCTERM DIAL UP FOR MAC OS#
#SYNCTERM DIAL UP MAC OS X#
#SYNCTERM DIAL UP SERIAL#

I telnetted in to an Atari ST BBS called Dark Force and headed to the games area. I tried typing an AT command, and it echoed. I immediately launched an old copy of VanTerm from within Hatari.

#SYNCTERM DIAL UP SERIAL#

The last step was to open Hatari and edit to its preferences, setting its serial emulation to use that same /tmp/josh file.

#SYNCTERM DIAL UP MAC OS X#

To my amazement, I landed on something that worked.Īfter launching tcpser4j, I fired up socat on the Mac OS X command line like this: socat PTY,link=/tmp/josh,raw,echo=0 TCP4:localhost:25232 Still, I did the best I could and tried many variations.

I just don’t understand all the TCP, ports, pipes, ttyS0s, and stuff. The documentation for socat is thorough, but it’s Greek to me. To enable this, I edited tcpser4j’s config-linux.xml file. I found out that tcpser4j offers something called an “IP232 port option” that is meant to work with a Commodore emulator called WinVICE.

However, by following instructions from Marcel Fiechter I got RXTXComm working. It requires RXTXComm, and initially RXTXComm wouldn’t work on my 64-bit Mac Pro. The first trick was getting tcpser4j to run. I downloaded tcpser4j and socat and installed them on my machine, a Mac Pro running OS X Mountain Lion. But maybe socat could allow tcpser to communicate with Hatari. I had a Mac on which I could run tcpser, but I did not have an Atari ST to connect to it. As icing on the cake, some versions of tcpser offer sound effects to make it sound like a modem is dialing and handshaking with another modem. After that, you can type Hayes “AT” commands into your Commodore’s terminal program, or even host a BBS on your Commodore. Then you connect the Commodore to the Mac with a serial cable. The way it’s typically used, tcpser is installed on a modern, internet-connected Mac or PC. Jim Brain created tcpser and tcpser4j (the Java version) to allow old Commodore computers to make telnet connections.

tcpser4j, “a piece of software that runs on a PC/Mac/Workstation and turns a regular rs232 port into an emulated Hayes compatible modem uses TCP/IP for the connection.”.

socat, “a relay for bidirectional data transfer between two independent data channels”.

I scoured the web and came up with two names: I had no idea how one might accomplish such a thing, but it seemed possible. I figured maybe there was a way to link a telnet connection to a virtual serial port that Hatari could access. Nor could I find any other terminal programs that did so.

#SYNCTERM DIAL UP FOR MAC OS#

I use SyncTerm for Mac OS X, which supports ANSI colors and graphics, as well as PETSCII and ATASCII (for 8-bit Commodores and Atari BBSes, respectively).Īlas, SyncTerm does not support the Atari ST flavor of VT-52. That led me to think about telnet, the main way I connect to BBSes these days. If you have a serial modem attached to your Mac or PC, Hatari can allow programs running inside the emulator to connect to it, and consequently the emulated Atari can dial in to a BBS. It turns out that the emulator Hatari has an option to emulate the Atari’s serial port. Could I somehow connect to a BBS using an Atari terminal in emulation? I no longer own my Atari 520ST and 1040STe, so using actual hardware was not an option. How would it have looked? I was curious.ĭo you enjoy my retrocomputing tutorials on Break Into Chat? Please join my email list and stay in touch. It supported VT-52 as well as plain ASCII, but not ANSI. I’ve been thinking about Space Empire Elite, one of the first BBS door games I ever played. Since I was mostly calling PC boards in those days, I used a terminal program called “ANSIterm” which could display ANSI graphics on the Atari ST using special tricks. PC BBSes with their colorful ANSI graphics were dominant in the early to mid-1990s, while Atari BBSes were dying out. PC clones, however had an 80×25 mode with 16 colors and special graphics characters. Atari’s VT-52 mode offered only 4 colors in medium resolution. But I seldom used the ST’s native terminal mode: VT-52. When I was a kid calling BBSes, I used an Atari ST computer.

#SYNCTERM DIAL UP HOW TO#

Please read my new tutorial on how to telnet to a BBS using a terminal inside the Hatari emulator. UPDATE (): In the years since I wrote this blog post, I have found some ways to improve this process.

Syncterm dial up