[15880] in Athena Bugs
Flaky emulation with HostEx32.exe and WindowsNT
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jacob Morzinski)
Mon Apr 6 01:34:07 1998
To: ktelnet-help@MIT.EDU
Cc: bugs@MIT.EDU
Date: Mon, 06 Apr 1998 01:33:59 EDT
From: "Jacob Morzinski" <jmorzins@MIT.EDU>
Hello,
Please, please, can MIT work out a license agreement for a
ktelnet program other than HostExplorer? Or maybe just tell
me about the existence of other programs that support ktelnet,
so I can take a look at them and buy one?
Host Explorer's VT emulation is horribly flaky in Windows NT.
The basic problem is that every now and then it misses, or
doesn't see, or somehow fails to process one of the VT control
codes arriving from the remote connection. Because of this, the
display becomes corrupted, requiring periodic full screen
refreshes, in order to continue working. (The bug is made more
annoying by the fact that the code that is typically dropped seems
to be some sort of "clear to end of line" or "clear block of
lines" code -- the typical failure mode is that some text is
simply not deleted from the screen, which can cause significant
confusion when you're trying to scroll down through your email.)
The frequency of the lossage can be somewhat reduced by setting
HostExplorer to perform "realistic" emulation, instead of
"optimized." With the realistic setting, I only see display
corruption every 60 seconds or so when I'm reading discuss in emacs.
(Roughly, that corresponds to reading 6 to 8 transactions.)
Emacs happens to be a particularly severe test of the emulation
capabilities of whatever emulator you're using. I've set
HostExplorer to the "VT100" emulation setting, in hopes that it
might have less lossage, but it didn't help.
In summary: trying to use the NT version HostExplorer to
connect to the athena.dialup machines is really, really painful.
If I had to do it for a full day every day, I'd go nuts.
Please, isn't anything better available?
-Jacob Morzinski
