vbaud — Virtually limit the bit/baud rate of your terminal

This file provides a slow-down as you would have had on a real terminal connected over a serial link. This is useful for displaying VT100 animated movies as they were meant to be watched. You can think of it as a rate-limited version of cat.

% make vbaud     # or: cc -o vbaud vbaud.c
% gzip -dc animation.vt.gz | ./vbaud 9600

(There probably is no need to turn on compiler optimizations😉)

Enjoy!

Example files

https://ftp.nice.ch/NiCE/vt100.anims/ contains a set of *.vt.gz files, with gzipped VT-100 animations. It also tries to give information about the files, including the creators where known.

Alternatives

pv -L can be used to rate-limit as well.

History

• 2017-11-12 This is git-repacked code I wrote for https://ftp.nice.ch/NiCE/vt100.anims/ in 2013 that turned out to be buggy.