last change: Dezember, 04 2011  

CaTer means Cartridge Terminal. It is a terminal program for the Commodore 64 (C64), published under the terms of GPL.

Please send any questions, bug reports or improvement suggestions to my mail account at LSto at gmx dot de.

About CaTer

CaTer is a terminal programm for the C64 providing a serial terminal for Linux or Unix hosts. It is written in assembler and resides in the memory at $8000. So it is possible to make either a CaTer auto start cartridge, or to load it with a BASIC loader from disk. For a convenient configuration of the Linux host, termcap and terminfo files as well as suitable settings for the shell are provided.

About the development

I started this project when I was supposed to prepare for my diploma thesis. On my Linux machine I use Adam Dunkels' as64 cross assembler to compile the program and the VICE emulator to test it. To log from VICE into my localhost I used modemu, but it seems to have vanished. Maybe tty0tty is a good substitute. For tests with a real C64 I used a Quickbyte eprommer to burn CaTer into an EPROM. However, the corresponding linux software now is definitely out of date. I think this is a good long term solution for an eprommer.

CaTer provides the following features:

• correct representation of all ASCII characters and some ISO-LATIN-9 characters includeing the € sign.
• keyboard input of all ASCII characters and control characters
• 300, 1200 and 2400 baud, 8N1 communication with 3-wire handshake, 9600 baud with hardware handshake with Daniel Dallmann's 9600 baud interface.
• interpretation of the most important ANSI ESC commands. The font attributes bold, underline, and blink are represented as different colours. Reverse characters are displayed reverse (what a surprise!-)
• 40 character screen, so you can really recognise all the characters.
• XMODEM sender and receiver.

CaTer is successfully tested with these programs:

• vi* (vim, nvi)
• Pine
• less, man
• info
• dselect
• w3m

*) If someone uses EMACS, tell me :-)

Download

There are three ways to get CaTer:

• CaTer-1.0-2011-12-04.tar.gz Complete archive with all sources, the compiled EPROM image, documentation, disk image, and unix files.
• cater.d64 The CaTer binary along with a BASIC loader on a D64 disk image. Especially useful to test CaTer within a C64 emulator.
• Single Components:
  • cater.crt EPROM image
  • terminfo terminfo
  • termcap termcap made with tic -C terminfo > termcap.
  • profile.cater.sh shell snipset to execute in your ~/.profile or /etc/profile on the UNIX/LINUX host.

The present and old releases of CaTer can be found on the Sourceforge page.

Related Links

These things were helpful for me and may be helpful for you.

• as64, C64 crosscompiler
• VICE emulator
• modemu, a modem emulaor, seems to have vanished. Maybe tty0tty is a good substitute.
• prommer, an burning program for the Quickbyte Prommer for Linux. Completely out of date. I guess this is a good long term solution for an eprommer (for any operating system).
• Daniel Dallmann's 9600 baud interface Meanwhile, this site is down and the only remnant I could find is at archive.org
• vt102 reference