It was about two years ago that I first took a look at iTerm -- a terminal emulator for Mac OSX that is being developed by a team on the Sourceforge website.

Today I downloaded the latest version of iTerm -- 0.10 -- and after over an hour of tinkering with the various settings, I was happy to discover the
right combination of settings which will allow the program to properly
display all PC-ANSI graphics on the Armageddon BBS, as well as on any other PC-ANSI-based BBS for that matter. In fact, as I type this message, I am
using iTerm to access the Armageddon BBS from another computer on our LAN,
and it looks pretty good. It is just about as good as using the Terminal on
a Leopard or Snow Leopard machine.

The reason why I decided to take another look at iTerm, is because unlike
the Terminal app which is included with Leopard and Snow Leopard -- which
can also properly display PC-ANSI graphics once a few settings are made --
the Terminal app which is included with earlier versions of Mac OSX does not appear capable of properly displaying PC-ANSI characters, no matter what
font is used, no matter what encoding is set, and no matter what emulation
is used. If there is a way to do it with Tiger's Terminal app, I certainly haven't been able to discover it, and I tried a number of times. I believe
it is because it is missing the necessary encoding -- Latin-US (DOS).

One reason why I am happy about making this discovery concerning iTerm, is because up until now, I have logged on to our BBS in one of three ways:

1. Going to the other machine and doing a local logon as SysOp using the
Hermes BBS software itself. Hermes is the software that I use to run our
BBS.

2. Logging on from my personal machine using clunky, Windows-looking
SyncTERM.

3. Logging on from my personal machine using my stripped down version of the Public Address BBS software in terminal mode, which only runs in a Classic environment.

Now that I have iTerm working, I no longer need SyncTERM -- which was a pain
to use anyway due to its very unMac-like interface. Not having to use Public Address also means that I have one less reason to keep Mac OS 9 installed on
my Tiger machine.

The only caveat about using iTerm is that -- unless I am missing something,
it does not appear to have support for the XMODEM, YMODEM and ZMODEM file transfer protocols. In other words, it doesn't appear that iTerm can be used
to upload and download files from BBSes. I have written to the developers
and am now waiting to see what they have to say about this. I also suggested that they consider adding a fullscreen text editor. It will make composing
BBS messages so much easier.

Anyway, while iTerm apparently can't be used for file transfers, you can use
it to do the following on our BBS:

1. Read and post messages.
2. Send local email and netmail.
3. Read the files in our BBS's online library.
4. Play the few BBS games that we offer.
5. Use the other utilities on our BBS.
6. Engage in live chat.

To successfully use iTerm as your BBS telnet client, I suggest that you use
the following settings:

1. Set the terminal type to "ansi".
2. Set the encoding to "Latin-US (DOS)".
3. Set the font to Lucida Console 18 point.
4. Set the foreground color to white.
5. Set the background color to black.
6. Enable anti-aliasing.
7. Disable blur.
8. Disable bold.
9. Set the window size to 80 columns by 48 rows.

Once you make the above adjustments, you can save them so that they are available in your default terminal profile with just one click of the mouse.

If you plan on downloading files, then you will have to use one of the
options that I mention in other posts; that is, ZOC or SyncTERM for OSX, or
my stripped down version of the Public Address BBS software for Mac Classic machines.

I hope that the above is helpful to you.



Jeff Snyder, SysOp - Armageddon BBS Visit us at endtimeprophecy.org port 23 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Your Download Center 4 Mac BBS Software & Christian Files. We Use Hermes II


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