[GreenKeys] A portable Baudot terminal

[Jim Haynes]

Sometimes I've wished for a portable Baudot terminal to use in testing
TTY gear.

I have an old Dell C610 laptop and those are dirt cheap on ebay, and have 
a COM port.  There are some old DOS programs that make a PC into a "glass 
TTY" and are still available.  One I have used is called rtty12g - you can 
google for it.

Now the trouble is that the laptop has Windows XP, and while rtty12g will
run under Windows XP it doesn't do the right thing.  Specifically it
doesn't set the UART to 5 bit characters; it sets the baud rate correctly
but sends 8 bit characters.  I guess in DOS the program can poke the
UART registers directly to get the desired properties.

So one solution would be if someone knows how to set the UART to 5 bits
in Windows XP and later.

A rather grubby way I have working now is that I have a floppy drive on
the laptop.  I formatted a floppy on a Win98 machine, then copied the
rtty12g files to it, and boot from the floppy.  This works, but I wouldn't
suggest to anybody to go through that process.

Another possibility is to create a partition on the hard drive in the
laptop and install FreeDOS and rtty12g.  Right now I don't know enough
about how to install just enough of FreeDOS and make it bootable along
with the other stuff on the laptop (WinXP and Linux).  I'm assuming
FreeDOS would let the program do what it wants to do to the hardware
registers.

Jim W6JVE

jhhaynes at earthlink dot net