VT340 Emulation

On Fri, Jun 25, 2021 at 04:53:08PM -0600, Grant Taylor via cctalk wrote: [...] A bit of both. The USB communications device class (CDC) is designed for modems, and it can be hit-and-miss trying to speak to something else. Of course, that doesn't prevent one from ignoring that standard and just creating a bespoke USB device which happens to produce RS232, and FTDI do just that. FTDI's devices are better than standard CDC, but that's not a terribly high bar. Well, these things will contain a UART of some form, because how else could they work? For all I know they may even incorporate an actual 16550 IP core in the design and talk to that from its firmware, although a UART uses bugger all gates by modern standards and you can just get an intern to design one in a lunchbreak rather than pay for an IP core. It doesn't seem impossible to build a decent USB-serial dongle which caters to all of the weird and wonderful edge cases, but the market for such things is small enough that they would be quite expensive to produce, reducing the market further. Something I'm putting off is installing a USB micro-B plug on my old iPod whose 30 pin socket has finally given up the ghost. I could just buy a new one, except they don't make them any more: the current device called an "iPod" is a glorified advertising hoarding which has a usability disaster of a media player bolted on as an afterthought.