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Real VT102 emulation with MAME (2020)
s a software developer, I spend a lot of time using the terminal, or more properly, a “terminal emulator”. Tools like iTerm2, or PuTTY, or GNOME Terminal, or the classic xterm and rxvt are all “terminal emulators”; they take raw text and formatting instructions and interpret them to display pretty text on the screen.
However, if you’re a modern software developer, that should make you nervous: confronted with a laundry-list of features, you can expect that they almost certainly interact with each other in surprising and difficult-to-predict ways, and you’ll probably need a lot more documentation, and a detailed test suite to be confident two implementations are compatible. I think ideally, MAME’s serial-port emulation should be updated to forcibly rate-limit input to match the configured baud rate, and maybe to manually implement flow control since apparently the kernel can’t do it reliably. We could write such a tool, of course — the most important parts would be setsid(2) to clear the current controlling terminal, and the TIOCSCTTY ioctl to set a new one, but we could do all the stty and environment-variable things too — but until the flow-control situation is fixed I don’t think it’s worth the effort.
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