[GreenKeys] HeavyMetal teletype program on Windows NT/2K/XP

[teletype at buzbee.net]

A few years ago I wrote a program to control a teletype machine via a serial
port and allow it to print things off of the internet (such as weather
reports, AP news summaries, ASCII art, etc.).  It was written in Perl and
ran on both Windows 95/98/ME and Linux.  It did not, however, work on
Windows NT/2K/XP because of the way it directly fiddled with the serial port
hardware.

Anyway, I've been intending to do a rewrite of the program for some time now
to solve that problem as well as add some new features to support Gil's
TTYConnect.  While doing a bit of research, I stumbled across a solution to
the Win NT/2K/XP problem.  There's likely a cleaner fix out there, but
WooHoo - HeavyMetal now runs on Windows XP!

The solution came from http://www.beyondlogic.org/porttalk/porttalk.htm

To try out HM on Windows NT/2K/XP, first download the PortTalk package at:

http://www.beyondlogic.org/porttalk/porttalk22.zip

Unzip porttalk22.zip and copy AllowIo.exe to c:\Windows\  (or somewhere else
in your path)

Next, grab the newest version of HeavyMetal at:

http://www.buzbee.net/heavymetal/HeavyMetal_1_12.zip

Unzip the file and then fire off a command shell (start->run->cmd).  "cd" to
the folder containing the unzipped heavymetal files.  There you'll find a
readme as well as the
Perl source code and heavymetal.exe executable.  Unless you want to do some
customization, you can ignore the Perl source (heavymetal.pl).  To run it,
type:

allowio heavymetal.exe /a

If all goes well, HeavyMetal should pop up in 30 seconds or so (it takes a
while to initialize).

I did a bit of cleanup on this version.  The AP news summary and AP Today in
History are working again, and I've added links to all of the great ASCII
art files recently added at rtty.com.  I also put in a new menu item for
weather reports.  It's a bit ugly, but you can select any of the city
weather reports produced by noaa.

In other cleanup news, I elminated the requirement that you install the lynx
text browser to get the AP news.  And finally, I deleted a bunch of commands
dealing with email and web browsing that I don't think anyone (including
myself) has ever used.

Let me know if you have any problems, or suggestions for the TTYConnect
version.

Bill Buzbee
bill at homebrewcpu.com