Wolfgang wrote:Yes, I can do this if need be, but since I have a working .DAT file, it'll probably not be necessary.
My main goal was to find the matching LADCONF file, maybe somebody still has it.
In any case, many thanks for your help and advise.
I don't think there is a matching LADCONF file. It sure sounds to me like someone patched the file for modern PC terminal emulators. (I'll just call that PC ANSI.)
The thing is, the ANSI specification is pretty deep, and I have yet to see a PC program that fully implements it, with 24 bit color, programmable key mapping, and all of the character attributes. (Thank the Lords of Kobol they didn't add vector graphics to the standard...)
I also looked at the output of LADDER with the ANSI config, and it looks completely wrong for PC emulators. I don't remember the specific codes, but it took me about two seconds to realize I didn't want to try to reverse engineer what it was doing, right at that time.
I also recently encountered another program that claimed to be ANSI compliant, but actually used ^[[
y;
xf for cursor positioning. I had never actually seen that sequence used before; I am used to seeing
H used for the cursor position. So, of course, my homebrew terminal program puked all over itself when I tried to run that program. Fortunately, f and H are largely interchangeable, except for a specific operating mode, in which you can inject new terminal sequences into the memory buffer for text already on the screen.... and if that sounds like it's as clear as mud, you should read the original documentation - it's even harder to understand what it's doing or why anyone would need to do that.
So coming back to my point... the VT-100 driver in LADCONF is probably all we're going to get, officially speaking, and it probably works as expected on whatever ONE terminal the guys at Yahoo Software actually had. The world ended up settling on a different set of standard ANSI commands, and hence the need for a patch.