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 > -- This mail was written by a user of The Arachne Browser - http://arachne.cz/ > Arachne at FreeLists > -- Arachne, The Premier GPL Web Browser/Suite for DOS -- -- This mail was written by a user of the Arachne Browser - http://arachne.cz/ -- Arachne 1.85:B6b:5r Arachne at FreeLists -- Arachne, The Premier GPL Web Browser/Suite for DOS --