Teletext returns from the dead. Again.

Posted May 12, 2010 – 15:20 in: Moonlit, Uncategorized

So! I figured it was about time I fired up the compiler and the ANSI editor again and resurrected my TelNEXT project, the one that simulates a teletext-like system but via telnet (since I don’t have any teletext inserters or, you know, a TV network). I did a little work on both sides, bugfixing and tidying on the code side and being almost artistic on the content side. I’ll let the screenshots do the talking:

I plan to add a lot more pages over the coming days/weeks/months, maybe even throw in some kind of content bridge to pull in comments from Twitter for a “letters” page or something, I don’t know yet, I’ll just see what happens.

I’ve figured out that, while it has less features than PabloDraw, TundraDraw sucks a whole lot less at actually keeping page designs to 40 characters wide, so if your terminal isn’t set up for 40 characters wide, it won’t make the pages look totally garbled any more. What will still make pages look totally garbled on the other hand is having an incorrect codepage. Use DOS/CP437, it makes the pages look how they’re supposed to. In fact, if you use Putty for Windows, here‘s a registry file that’ll set up a Putty profile called “Teletext” which is set up absolutely perfectly for using TelNEXT on the same machine as Putty. If you want to run the server on another machine or connect to someone else’s server, just switch up the IP address in Putty. That reminds me, it’s not called TelNEXT any more, it’s TNXT now, because… well, because.

Anyway, that about it for now, I’ll try and come back more often now, my ever rotating todo list has swung back around to trying to be productive, so we shall see. In the meantime, you can grab the latest version of TNXT (contains a few test pages) right here, and if you want to make pages for it, go check out TundraDraw for Windows or your favourite ANSI editor elsewhere – remember, 40×22, anything bigger will look like crap!

Via Moonlit from The Moonlit Code