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Comment by Sir_Cmpwn | Hacker News Reader

Author here. I got the pictured one refurbished through vecmar.com, and I just bought a second one on eBay (for use at home).

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Very cool post :)

The VT220 supports Sixels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixel

I wonder if PySixel would work on real hardware: https://github.com/saitoha/PySixel

HN thread about libsixel: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11340367

That's pretty cool! It reminds me of a similar project I did called z80e, which is an emulator for TI calculators [0]. It uses unicode braille to "render" the screen onto a terminal. Doesn't work on the VT220, though, for obvious reasons.

[0] https://github.com/KnightOS/z80e

Fascinating!

I'm reading the source code of z80e (tui.c). Your idea of using unicode to display pixels is very interesting. I imagine a fallback mode for libsixel for terminals not sixel-compatible (or the opposite).

I try ton compile but it fails (first because scas was missing and now I have an "a2x: not found" in scas).

I appreciate a lot the "multitarget rendering" (emscripten, tui, sdl...).

a2x should be provided by the asciidoc package on your distribution. It's used to compile man pages.

I'd merge a pull request adding libsexl support!

> a2x should be provided by the asciidoc ...

Yes, thank you (I'm on Debian). I know a bit more after reading the wiki. I will follow the instructions for the sdk.

> I'd merge a pull request adding libsexl support!

Cool! I'm discovering the new world of custom tools for TI (KnightOS, Axe Parser, OS2...).

I will look at the SDL UI to see what I can do.

BTW z80 is good target for superoptimization and I'm very impressed by your toolchain and its history :)

I remember someone at school wrote a program to inspect a remote Decstation 3100 (1024x864x1) screen on a vt320. Frequently people were running X with "xhost +".

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