[GreenKeys] HeavyMetal teletype program on Windows NT/2K/XP

[gil smith]

Hi Bill:

Glad to see an update to HM!

Don't have a tty hooked up yet, but the program is running just fine, and 
the AP and weather stuff started printing on the screen.

I look forward to trying out on real hardware.

thanks,

gil


At 12:28 AM 2/20/2005, you wrote:

>A few years ago I wrote a program to control a teletype machine via a serial
>port and allow it to print things off of the internet (such as weather
>reports, AP news summaries, ASCII art, etc.).  It was written in Perl and
>ran on both Windows 95/98/ME and Linux.  It did not, however, work on
>Windows NT/2K/XP because of the way it directly fiddled with the serial port
>hardware.
>
>Anyway, I've been intending to do a rewrite of the program for some time now
>to solve that problem as well as add some new features to support Gil's
>TTYConnect.  While doing a bit of research, I stumbled across a solution to
>the Win NT/2K/XP problem.  There's likely a cleaner fix out there, but
>WooHoo - HeavyMetal now runs on Windows XP!
>
>The solution came from http://www.beyondlogic.org/porttalk/porttalk.htm
>
>To try out HM on Windows NT/2K/XP, first download the PortTalk package at:
>
>http://www.beyondlogic.org/porttalk/porttalk22.zip
>
>Unzip porttalk22.zip and copy AllowIo.exe to c:\Windows\  (or somewhere else
>in your path)
>
>Next, grab the newest version of HeavyMetal at:
>
>http://www.buzbee.net/heavymetal/HeavyMetal_1_12.zip
>
>Unzip the file and then fire off a command shell (start->run->cmd).  "cd" to
>the folder containing the unzipped heavymetal files.  There you'll find a
>readme as well as the
>Perl source code and heavymetal.exe executable.  Unless you want to do some
>customization, you can ignore the Perl source (heavymetal.pl).  To run it,
>type:
>
>allowio heavymetal.exe /a
>
>If all goes well, HeavyMetal should pop up in 30 seconds or so (it takes a
>while to initialize).
>
>I did a bit of cleanup on this version.  The AP news summary and AP Today in
>History are working again, and I've added links to all of the great ASCII
>art files recently added at rtty.com.  I also put in a new menu item for
>weather reports.  It's a bit ugly, but you can select any of the city
>weather reports produced by noaa.
>
>In other cleanup news, I elminated the requirement that you install the lynx
>text browser to get the AP news.  And finally, I deleted a bunch of commands
>dealing with email and web browsing that I don't think anyone (including
>myself) has ever used.
>
>Let me know if you have any problems, or suggestions for the TTYConnect
>version.
>
>Bill Buzbee
>bill at homebrewcpu.com
>
>
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