Serial Terminal

Thanks to Twitter/X, I got my hands on a DEC VT510 terminal in superb condition but without a keyboard. To achieve a 100% Digital Equipment Corporation look, I bought a DEC PC keyboard, since the VT510 accepts any keyboard with a mini-DIN connector. Since FUZIX is in the lineage of 1970s UNIXes, it would make sense to display the FUZIX virtual terminal using a physical terminal. The VT510 offers two serial connectors, male and female, and is capable of serial connections up to 115000 baud. This is precisely the default speed of the serial connection of FUZIX on PICO. All that remains is to try it out.

PICO / VT510 Connection

I replaced the FTDI component with a 3.3V TTL to DB9 RS232 adapter, like the one in the photo below.

The result on the breadboard is as follows.

VT Terminal Power On

Let’s see what happens, with the setting 115200 baud / 8 data bits / 1 stop bit / no parity. The terminal emulation is also set to VT52 which is the default terminal emulation provided by FUZIX.

A close-up of the screen shows the copyright and FUZIX boot messages clearly: no display problems!

Finally the login banner appears.

The error message about the date is curious: the input is correct but the characters displayed are not the right ones.

Test Conclusion

After login, the display works: the commands ls and df give the expected results. This configuration is therefore usable. However, during typing, characters are added to the screen randomly: the command entered is correctly received by FUZIX but the display of the input is not reliable.

These problems are random: the same command entered several times, here df, causes different spurious characters to be displayed.

This is where I leave my experiments for now.