How to make a Terminal (running in an Atari ST emulator on a Mac) talk to a Telnet BBS?

Question

There are a number of Atari ST BBSes still running today, available via Telnet. I connect to some of these occasionally using SyncTerm on my Mac.

It would be even better to use an ATARI Terminal program on an emulated Atari ST to connect to these BBSes, for a more authentic experience; so I could use VT-52 mode, for example.

My ideal setup would be: Atari terminal program (say, “Freeze Dried Terminal”) running in an Atari emulator (say “Hatari”) on my Mac. I Telnet to a BBS, and somehow the output from that Telnet session is piped into the emulator's emulated RS232 port, allowing me to control the Telnet session from the terminal program.

It seems like this may be possible in Hatari. It does offer RS232 emulation.

The manual suggests writing RS232 output to a file like /dev/ttyS0 on a Linux machine.

I am a Unix novice, but I would love to try and make this work. Can anyone offer any suggestions? Is there a way to make a virtual serial port talk to a Telnet connection?

Answer 1

Turns out this was possible. The key ingredients were:

• tcpser4j, “a piece of software that runs on a PC/Mac/Workstation and turns a regular RS232 port into an emulated Hayes compatible modem [that] uses TCP/IP for the connection.”
• socat, “a relay for bidirectional data transfer between two independent data channels”

Tcpser4j handled the telnet/modem part, and socat enabled Hatari to talk with tcpser4j.

I blogged in more detail about how I got this to work here.