ANSI Terminal is a "dumb" terminal that emulates part of a VT100. It is sufficient to use with vi under 2.11bsd, and it also works well as a dumb terminal for Linux. It successfully allows editing using the "vim" editor. An M68K (M68000) soft-core processor is contained in an FPGA on a CYC1000 module, and handles all the processing chores.

This project contains IP cores as follows:

https://github.com/ijor/fx68k provides the M68000 processor.

https://opencores.org/projects/a_vhd_16550_uart provides a 16550 compatible uart.

Unlike many existing terminal projects, this project targets 1280x1024 monitors, which are much more common than the 640x480 monitors of days gone by. This also allows higher quality characters, using 16x32 glyphs, rather than the more common 8x16 glyphs.

The terminal supports both hardware and software flow control, as selected by a dip switch, and baud rates from 110 to 115200 are supported.

This project contains the KiCAD schematic, board layout, gerbers, and a 3-D printable case design. Note that this is a 2-layer board with surface mount components.

A companion project, https://github.com/stevefalco/ansi-terminal-firmware contains the FPGA and assembly language software for the ANSI Terminal.

Here are photos of the case, pcb, schematic and displayed text. There is a higher resolution copy of the schematic in file terminal.pdf.

ANSI Terminal

(c) 2021 Steven A. Falco

ANSI Terminal is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

ANSI Terminal is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with ANSI Terminal. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.