The MTerm Project

What is MTerm?

The MTerm Protocol is a system whereby fonts, shapes and so forth can be integrated into ANSI displays common of BBSs.

Why?

Plain ANSI is getting a little boring. MTerm is constricted by its ability to act as an 'overlay' (there must be NO requirement for the SysOp to change BBS servers) where MTerm acts as a duplicate set of menus.

What's the point - everybody is using the Internet now...

Arcade BBS and The Plasma Sphere BBS are two I know of that offer weekend telnet access to the BBS. It is bog-standard VT1xx/VT2xx. What MTerm hopes to offer is a dual dial-up/telnet terminal supporting ANSI and file transfers and, of course, MTerm.

I've downloaded your early demo from Arcade. Says nothing about fonts and the like...

I know. The early plans were to transfer the BBS menu as a RiscOS template file. This is still awaiting (protocol part B) but MTerm is more likely to be accepted of it is a little less contrived.

This is all very good for people using this 'RiscOS' thing. What if I run DOS?

The 'RiscOS thing' is probably one of the nicest, most compact and effective OSs ever written. Anyhow, there are no plans for a DOS or Windows version. It could be done (the fonts would be a bit iffy) but I have not given it much more thought.

The MTerm protocol that you see is officially called MTerm (A) where the A means it is part A of the MTerm protocol.

A - Fonts and drawing primatives over ANSI.
B - Template GUI.
C - Extensions to part A (such as external tasks or sprite plotting).
D - Extensions to part B (example - HTML).

Only part A and some of part C has been defined at this time. You can see these details from the index below.

The script, as it stands now, offers:

Automatic download initiation (all supported protocols).
Support for external tasks which will provide more facilities external to the MTerm program itself.
Drawing primatives: colour, move, line, (filled) rectangle, (filled) circle and access to the plot routines for more control.
Outline font plotting, in colours or monochrome (colours don't get anti-aliased very well). 14 predefined font styles available.
Access to ten system parameters to pass values to external tasks.

THE INDEX:

MTerm script definition - part A (revsion 5)
MTerm script definition - part C (revision 3)
Wimp messages interface (revision 1)
Download the MTerm terminal emulator (v3.14 193K)
Read the MTerm versions file
How to implement external tasks

This software may now be uploaded to BBSs supporting RiscOS computers.
It is NOT, however, to be uploaded to a WWW site. Please provide a link to this page instead. PD libraries and magazines, please contact me if you wish to make MTerm available.
Thank you.

For the slightly dopier people out there, this code is RISCOS SPECIFIC so don't even bother asking why it won't run under Windows or MacOS.
The archive is zipped so you should be able to peek in it and see that it really is possible to get a fully multitasking program into an executable smaller than the memory size of many mid-80's computers.

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