25 Jul
2010
25 Jul
'10
11:29 a.m.
Hi Tony,
I'm sort of surprised to hear you say that RS232 ports on a PCI card are
OK with you. Maybe it's because I'm primarily a software guy, but for
Well, I'll admit I've never used them, I don't own a machine with a PCI
bus (and electornically, I regard PCI as a right royal kludge!).
But I'd assumed you got somerthing that looked like a 8250 (or a 16550 or
similar) at a particualr base address, and you could just access the I/O
registers as usual. Is that not the case?
some purposes I loathe RS232 ports on PCI cards almost
as much as I do
USB. I think my loathing of both technologies is much the same as
yours, in that in some cases they both make it more difficult for me to
do precisely what I wish to do. Just as one example, I have some legacy
DOS-based software containing its own UART driver. I don't even want to
think about trying to make that work on a PCI card RS232 port.
What is the great problem with doing this?
BTW, I don't mean to imply that I unconditionally loathe these two bits
of technology - just when they get in my way. At other times, I greatly
I hate any technology that gets in my way, or which makes my life harder.
Unfortuantely, it apprars that the old joke 'user friendly == hacker
hostile' is all too tru, and that an awful lot of modern stuff may well
be user friendly in that it's easy to get it to do what the
manfuacturers intend, but it sure isn't easy to get it to do what I want..
Having seen bits of PCI card design, I am glad I design cards for my
classics with ISA, Unibus, DIO-1, etc buses. Those I can understand and
wire up a card for any one of them in a couple of hours...
-tony