ANSI in BIOS

[[e-mail]]

It seems to me that the job of interpreting ANSI escape
codes and manipulating the screen should be offloaded
to the BIOS (or a BIOS extension) rather than be something
the OS gets involved in.

The BIOS may in fact simply be redirecting the escape
codes down a serial port with a VT100 (or whatever)
terminal attached.

BFN. Paul.

[wolfgang kern]

Post by ***@gmail.com
It seems to me that the job of interpreting ANSI escape
codes and manipulating the screen should be offloaded
to the BIOS (or a BIOS extension) rather than be something
the OS gets involved in.
The BIOS may in fact simply be redirecting the escape
codes down a serial port with a VT100 (or whatever)
terminal attached.

you mean these old 26xx codes? last seen on my HP LPT-printer [RIP]

me think they should be part of the printer driver because the BIOS may
not know which printer become connected. I never saw it used on screen.

serial ports? not more available other than USB and HDMI today

you could ask James to join your museum :)
__
wolfgang

[[e-mail]]

Post by wolfgang kern
me think they should be part of the printer driver because the BIOS may
not know which printer become connected. I never saw it used on screen.

Maybe the BIOS needs to be configured with what
terminal is attached? Anyway, I found out that the
Atari ST BIOS is designed to support a VT52:

https://freemint.github.io/tos.hyp/en/About_the_BIOS.html#Bconout

So there is prior art.

Note that the Atari ST doesn't have a graphics card
with text mode, so the BIOS needs to convert all
this into graphics. Same as the Amiga.

Post by wolfgang kern
serial ports? not more available other than USB and HDMI today

I'm still stuck in 1990, freshly armed with ISO/IEC 9899:1990
and trying to spread this standardized language, and now an
operating system to go with it, on every 32-bit platform known
to man, and then every 64-bit platform, and then see if there is
anything I can do about 16-bit platforms. I'm happy to
cross-compile using SDCC when I reach that stage.

Post by wolfgang kern
you could ask James to join your museum :)

You'll be the one in trouble if we end up having to rebuild
civilization from scratch and you don't know what to do
with a serial port! :-)

Just a few hours ago I realized that I might be able to
get MVS/380 to drive an EBCDIC ANSI terminal, which
basically behaves like a serial port. I already have
PDOS/3X0 driving an EBCDIC ANSI terminal, allowing
me to run micro-emacs on the mainframe.

BFN. Paul.