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Author Topic: BLU and HyperTerminal  (Read 8429 times)

blusnowkitty

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BLU and HyperTerminal
« on: May 02, 2024, 07:44:58 pm »

Has anyone ever had any luck dumping diskettes and transferring them with HyperTerminal? I replaced my SCC today and while all the replacements I got all now work fine for simply bashing on the keyboard to make text pop out of either end, I cannot either end to see an Xmodem transfer.


For the curious: I suspect my original SCC is one of those infamous faulty chips sold as NOS - there's no evidence of sanding, but the legs were all suspiciously tinned. Oh well, I have a bunch of very pretty ceramic and gold SCCs now, so I'm happy.
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sigma7

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Re: BLU and HyperTerminal
« Reply #1 on: May 02, 2024, 08:59:59 pm »

any luck ... with HyperTerminal?

The BLU manual says:

Quote
NOTE: HyperTerminal won't work for bootstrapping as it mangles CR/LF combinations!

Which seems sufficiently specific that it might do an xmodem transfer ok, but it could also mean it was a non-starter and so wasn't considered worth testing -- sorry I don't recall.

Given no progress in either direction, I'd guess it is a handshaking issue.

In any case, trying an alternative may be informative.

Good luck!

edit:

This post from Ray implies that HyperTerminal could work, but doesn't confirm he tested it.

edit 2:

In a 2007-02-01 email exchange with Ray there is this comment:

Quote
HyperTerminal rejects the data UNLESS you wait until a couple of timeout failures pass; whence it switches from CRC to checksum; if you start sending then it works ok.

It may be that was before BLU understood CRC, but it seems worth trying.
« Last Edit: May 02, 2024, 09:08:13 pm by sigma7 »
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patrick

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Re: BLU and HyperTerminal
« Reply #2 on: May 03, 2024, 02:11:28 am »

The version of Hyperterminal that comes with Windows XP works fine with both BLU and UsbWidEx XMODEM transfers. This runs on the lab notebook I'm using with vintage computer hardware
« Last Edit: May 04, 2024, 02:06:03 am by patrick »
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compu_85

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Re: BLU and HyperTerminal
« Reply #3 on: May 03, 2024, 08:00:13 pm »

I always use TeraTerm.
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stepleton

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Re: BLU and HyperTerminal
« Reply #4 on: May 04, 2024, 07:50:37 am »

I'm a Linux person, and I don't have relevant things to say for Windows. But since we're talking about xmodem transfer, the standard Linux program that does xmodem, ymodem, and zmodem reception ("rx", "rb", and "rz", but deep down it's the same program) has the annoying habit of dealing with fatal errors not just by quitting but by deleting the file that it was receiving first!

While I forget whether this led to trouble with BLU, with UsbWidEx, there's a disagreement between the way rx does xmodem and the way UsbWidEx does it. This disagreement arises at the very end of the transfer, and rx has a tantrum and fatal-errors. The hard drive image you spent many minutes downloading (all while wondering if the drive itself will survive!) is deleted immediately. It's very frustrating!

The quick-and-dirty workaround is to go to another terminal window while the image is being transferred and make a hard link (plain `ln`, not `ln -s`) to the file being downloaded. rx will unlink the original filesystem entry for the image, but your second entry is just as good. The image itself will be fine no matter what rx thinks about it.
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sigma7

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Re: BLU and HyperTerminal
« Reply #5 on: May 04, 2024, 02:55:33 pm »

Linux ... xmodem transfer ... has the annoying habit of dealing with fatal errors not just by quitting but by deleting the file that it was receiving first!

... at the very end of the transfer ... The hard drive image you spent many minutes downloading (all while wondering if the drive itself will survive!) is deleted immediately ... frustrating!

Ouch! Congrats figuring out a work-around!

There is a BLU bug report (from Ray) indicating that he saw some Linux xmodem transfers that didn't terminate properly, but it doesn't seem to be a popular problem, and his report was years after release.

Looking for info, I found this (may or may not be related): https://www.mattkeeter.com/blog/2022-05-31-xmodem/, which mentions an issue with an FTDI USB-to-serial module driver interfering with the xmodem packet timing. Apparently the driver's latency is/was easy to adjust on Windows and Linux, but not MacOS -- his MacOS fix referenced at https://openbci.com/forum/index.php?p=/discussion/comment/17915/#Comment_17915.

Can anyone confirm that the BLU xmodem issue is specifically an issue with compatibility with the Linux implementation or perhaps there are anecdotes with changing serial dongles fixing an xmodem problem?
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compu_85

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Re: BLU and HyperTerminal
« Reply #6 on: May 05, 2024, 05:40:01 pm »

Hmm. I know I had little success with GUI terminal software on my Mac. In trying to use minicom, the installer didn't bring down the zmodem binaries... that took me hours to figure out what was going on.

-J
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sigma7

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Re: BLU and HyperTerminal
« Reply #7 on: September 15, 2024, 02:12:28 pm »

the standard Linux program that does xmodem, ymodem, and zmodem reception ("rx", "rb", and "rz", but deep down it's the same program) has the annoying habit of dealing with fatal errors not just by quitting but by deleting the file that it was receiving first!
...
The hard drive image you spent many minutes downloading (all while wondering if the drive itself will survive!) is deleted immediately

I'm working on a new version of BLU, and hoped to fix this annoyance, but I can't reproduce it.

Using a Prolific USB-serial interface, and rz -X, and lrz -X with minicom 2.9 (under Monterey / Homebrew), xmodem transfers seem to work normally.

I'll look for an FTDI interface, but if anyone has pointers on how to induce the failure please let me know!

James
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