[GreenKeys] Heavymetal

[Dan Beach]

Thanks to Bill Buzbee for his update of Heavymetal and integration with
Porttalk. It finally gave me the tools that got my Model 15 back up and
running. What a terrific program!! My long-dormant 15 is now printing out AP
news like a pro (the original AP sign on the front is practically glowing).
Thanks to the RYs and QBFs I was able to hone in on long abused settings.
Its running very cleanly on a Win 2000 system with the WA2HWU RS-232
interface.

Now that I have the machine tuned, thanks to Heavymetal, I look forward to
finally being able to copy off air using the Dovetron. I've lurked on
Greenkeys for over a year, reading avidly. Always looking for a way to get
back into RTTY, which I first entered in 1963, reading news from USN ships.

Thank you Bill - and Greenkeys !!

Dan Beach
KD4WLI


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Message: 3

Date: Sat, 19 Feb 2005 23:28:17 -0800

From: <teletype at buzbee.net>

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

To: <greenkeys at mailman.qth.net>

Message-ID: <000001c5171d$c23b3e00$8f00a8c0 at Saturn>

Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

 

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
<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
<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
<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