Comment by an-unknown
Comment by an-unknown 2 days ago
The only problem with real VTs is you have to be careful not to get one where the CRT has severe burn-in, like in the ebay listing. Sure, some VTs (like the VT240 or VT525) are a separate main box + CRT, but then you're missing the "VT aesthetics". The VT525 is probably the easiest one to get which also uses (old) standard interfaces like VGA for the monitor and PS/2 for the keyboard, so you don't need an original keyboard / CRT. At least for me, severe burn-in, insane prices, and general decay of some of the devices offered on ebay are the reason why I don't have a real VT (yet).
The alternative is to use a decent VT emulator attached to roughly any monitor. By "decent" I certainly don't mean projects like cool-retro-term, but rather something like this, which I started to develop some time ago and which I'm using as my main terminal emulator now: https://github.com/unknown-technologies/vt240
There is firmware available online for some terminals; you could potentially get a lot more accuracy in emulating the actual firmware, but I'm sure a lot of that code gets into the guts of timing CRT cycles and other "real-world" difficulties. I'm not suggesting this would be easy to build out, just pointing out that it's available. While I haven't searched for the VT240 firmware, the firmware for the 8031AH CPU inside the VT420 (and a few other DEC terminals) is available on bitsavers. The VT240 has a T-11 processor, which is actually a PDP-11-on-a-chip.