Coder's Guild Mailing List

Re: Serial Port IO

Posted by Nphyx on 2000-11-12

First, disclaimer:  I don't know how much of this is plausable because I
don't know how serial ports work, it's just a far-fetched suggestion in
place of anything better.
Assuming Windows is not capable of that kind of fine control of what goes
over a serial port, two ideas came to my mind:
First, just because Windows isn't, doesn't mean DOS isn't, you might look
into that (anybody here know how it could be done in DOS?)...  It'd be ugly,
but using a DOS mouse driver, you'd probably get something usable.
Second, and this is really a pretty big stretch, but if serial port bit
streams go pin by pin sequentially, and if you can figure out the order, you
could use assembler to construct the stream bit by bit so that what you want
goes to each pin in order.  But that also means that if you need to set up
your device so that you can send some sequence to each pin that will tell it
to do nothing...  That's pretty complicated.  You might be able to construct
the stream manually in C too, but I don't think it is capable of that sort
of thing.
I really don't know if that is at all useful, but at least if it won't work
all you've lost is the time it took to read it.