CaTer

About CaTer

CaTer means Cartridge Terminal. It is a terminal program for the C64 providing a serial terminal for Linux or Unix hosts. CaTer 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. CaTer is published under the terms of GPL.

Features:

• Correct representation of all ASCII characters and some ISO-LATIN-9 characters including 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 and underline are represented as different colours. Reverse characters are displayed reverse (what a surprise!-). Even ANSI fore- and background colours are interpreted as good as possible.
• Connection to a host via a XS1541 cable with XD2031 firmware (needs to be tested).
• XMODEM sender and receiver.

Further new features since version 1.0 are:

• Config menu to set baud rate, floppy device number, and the connection over the IEC bus.
• New timings for 1200 and 2400 baud in the PAL version to make these speeds reliable.
• Improved user guidance and help.
• Colour support in terminfo and termcap file.
• Cursor can be set invisible.
• Vim syntax file for 6502 assembler.
• Many bug fixes, see changelog.

Compatibility

Below is a list of some of the programs being tested successfully with CaTer. Have also a look at the screenshots.

• vi* (vim, nvi)
• mutt
• less, man
• info
• aptitude
• w3m

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

Download

There are three ways to get CaTer:

• CaTer-1.3-2025-02-28.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 infotocap terminfo > termcap.
  • profile.cater.sh shell snipset to execute in your ~/.profile or /etc/profile on the UNIX/LINUX host.

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

Related Links

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

• ↥xa, an open-source 6502 cross assembler. It is used to compile the CaTer source.
• ↥VICE emulator, emulating Commodore 8-bit computers including the C 64
• A microcontroller driven ↥eprommer for the serial port. It depends only on a terminal emulator on the host and therefore is suitable 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
• ↥XD 2031 firmware and software to conntect a linux host to a C64 as floppy and communication bridge. A suitabe hardware for the connection is the ↥XS 1541.