VT-52 text art (Atari ST)

[Kirkman]

I am in the middle of trying to hunt down any examples of VT-52 text art that I can find. This is the Atari ST equivalent of ANSI art. The VT-52 uses escape codes similar to ANSI, but not the same.

Anyway, I found recently that dexvert misidentifies the following file as ANSI, generating a bad PNG, when it is in fact VT-52:

http://discmaster.textfiles.com/view/15782/PD%20Konzentrat.zip/PD%20Konzentrat.iso/Vision/Vi_400/VI_366.ZIP/V_366/COLORBBS/COLORTTL.MSG

This is how that file actually displays on an Atari ST:

COLORTTL.MSG.mov

I don't know that it's worth your time to write a converter for this, and I'm not aware of any libraries ala ansilove that can handle it.

Still, FWIW, here are a few more examples of VT-52 text files that currently exist within Discmaster, for your reference:

• COMMANDO.TXT
• fujiboin.txt
• SCHNAH.TXT
• welcome1.v52
• welcome2.v52

Info about the Atari ST's implementation of VT-52 (includes add'l commands):

• VT-52 on Wikipedia, GEMDOS/TOS section
• "VT-52 Emulator" chapter of "The Atari Compendium"
• "VT-52 Terminal" section of "The Documentation for TOS"
• Atari ST VT52 escape codes from dcplaya documentation
• "VT-52 Control Codes with Atari Extensions" section of "Buchla 700 Source Code"

[Sembiance]

Thanks for the info, sample file links and vid!

It would be nice to add, but the 2 biggest problems are:

1. Properly detecting the format without too many false positives
2. Writing code to convert the format (possibly via a patch to ansilove or something)

Not sure if #1 could be solved well enough to make #2 worth doing and I'm not sure if discmaster 2 would encounter enough of these to make the effort worthwhile.

I've added this to my to-do list and I'll leave this issue open until the day comes when I have some extra time to look into it further.

PS: I really appreciate the suggestion and links/info!

[Kirkman]

Yep, totally understand. It probably doesn't make sense to work on detecting VT-52 specifically, but it may make sense to use this info to tweak your ANSI detection to avoid false positives.