FreeLists / arachne / [arachne] Re: Upgrading Arachne

["Bastiaan T.Edelman" <bastiaan.pa3ffz@xxxxxxxxx>]

Arachne at FreeLists---The Arachne Fan Club!

On Wed, 17 May 2006 19:42:28 +0000, Udo Kuhnt wrote:

> Arachne at FreeLists---The Arachne Fan Club!

>>> How to live without serial (RS232) or parallel (PRN) ports?
>>> Can we cope???

>> That's a real problem you bring up--the evolution of hardware away
>> from the old "standard equipment" that DOS was designed for. There is
>> still lots of used equipment available, but it's getting harder to find
>> as we all know.

> This leads to a rather interesting question - what is to be considered
> "standard equipment", and who (or what) is reponsible for maintaining
> compatibility with this standard?

> For example, if a serial port is to be considered part of the standard
> hardware, can a program then rely on a fully functional serial port to
> be present? And if there is none, is it necessary to provide some kind
> of emulation to fake its presence? Not that I really know how to emulate
> an RS232 serial connection over USB, that is.

Devices that convert USB to RS232 are sold. They can be used to key a
transmitter, to drive a modem or to handle the signals of measuring
equipment. But... I am afraid that there are no drivers in DOS for these
USB=>RS232 converters.

Regards, Bastiaan

> However, I think anything that uses a well-defined software API, like
> the BIOS, should also work on modern hardware, shouldn't it?

> Udo

> -- The DR-DOS/OpenDOS Enhancement Project - http://www.drdosprojects.de

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