[Coco] serial port problem

[Aaron Wolfe]

On Oct 31, 2013 12:24 PM, "Mathieu Bouchard" <matju at artengine.ca> wrote:
>
> Le 2013-10-31 à 06:49:00, Bill Pierce a écrit :
>
>
>> You have the cable, now you just need the software. The old baud rates
no longer apply.
>
>
> I had already downloaded DW4, but I just wanted to test the connection.
If I can't get anything to be transmitted outside of DW4 above 2400, I
won't be able to get above 2400 inside of DW4. Both software are supposed
to be able to go up to 19200.
>

This is inaccurate.   You will be able to do transfers at up to 230,400 bps
using DriveWire because of Darren's awesome bit banger routines.  These
routines are only found in the HDBDOS for DriveWire and the OS9 DriveWire
modules, so the speeds you see in other software (which uses different
serial IO code) is largely irrelevant.

Various terminal programs tried different tricks to make the bit banger go
faster than the BASIC ROM routines, which are limited to 600 bps iirc (it's
some very slow speed).  Because the operation of the bit banger is largely
software defined, there is no set clock speed like you would have in a
UART.   Better code can make the port work faster and/or more reliably than
poor code.  This makes serial IO on the coco bit banger quite a different
beast than the typical scenario where things like port speed are fixed and
control lines are handled in specialized hardware with rigid behavior.  For
instance,  we use the CD pin on the coco as part of the read data operation
to achieve speeds over 115k.  You couldn't typically re purpose a pin on a
serial port connected to a UART like that (of course, some exceptions do
apply, but the point is that a software defined bit banger is very
different to a uart).

Long story short, behavior in one coco serial program can be entirely
different than another.  If you have 300 bps or 2400 bps or really any comm
at all between PC and coco,  you are probably fine.

> Besides, DW4 doesn't detect my serial port, and when I try to add it
manually, the window is too small for its contents and I can't find a way
to resize it (and there seems to be a non-working horizontal scrollbar
too). This is in Linux (Ubuntu 12.04) and I haven't tried my serial port in
any other way inside Linux yet (my other software was in DOS), but at least
I'd expect the « add serial port » dialogue-box to be of the proper size,
or otherwise usable.
>

It is difficult to size some gui components to display correctly on the
huge range of platforms we try to support.  Linuxes vary a lot from
distribution to distro, window manager to wm, etc. I haven't tested on an
Ubuntu machine in a while.

I can make it bigger in the next version.  Can you send me a screen shot of
what it looks like?

You have find changing your display resolution makes the dialog usable in
the meantime.  You can also use the configuration editor or any text editor
on config.xml to manually set the port.


>
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