Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!lll-lcc!unisoft!mtxinu!taniwha!paul From: paul@taniwha.UUCP (Paul Campbell) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac Subject: Re: Serial ports Message-ID: <231@taniwha.UUCP> Date: 6 Dec 88 04:18:54 GMT References: <362@lakart.UUCP> <46100241@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> Reply-To: paul@taniwha.UUCP (Paul Campbell) Organization: Taniwha Systems Design, Oakland Lines: 41 In article <46100241@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> leonardr@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu writes: > > Please note that Apple has NOT YET defined a way for communications software >to access more than the two standard serial ports. If you are writing your won >software to access the cards, then you will be O.K., but you will only work with >that particular brand of card, and not others.. > Just some info to keep in mind. This is very true, Apple have announced that they are working on something called the 'Communications Manager', what they've shown publically seems to be very good. However programs that use serial ports will require major rewrites. In the mean time there is a standard interface (the existing serial ports), our board (CommCard) uses this interface (but you open each port with a different name). Untill Apple's new code comes out for our board we have two possible solutions: - a software port remapper for the A/B ports, this is not much more than a software A/B box, but it lets existing programs work - the ability to search the system for serial ports (I posted this in comp.sys.mac.programmer a few months ago) so that you can throw their names up in a dialog box. However this requires programs to be modified. As far as I know this mechanism works with all the serial cards I know of. Of course many people who want to use serial ports want to do so from scratch for scientific or control applications (for example I have one user with 20 ports on his mac doing data collection), these people don't seem to need much more than the ability to open particular ports by name (so that they know which port is wired to which device). Paul -- Paul Campbell ..!{unisoft|mtxinu}!taniwha!paul (415)420-8179 Taniwha Systems Design, Oakland CA "Read my lips .... no GNU taxes"