25 Jun
2021
25 Jun
'21
1:48 a.m.
On Thu, Jun 24, 2021 at 06:46:41PM -0600, Grant Taylor via cctalk wrote:
[...]
USB-serial dongles tend to be a wretched experience for a couple of reasons.
The first is at the electrical layer: USB only has 5V available and
generating RICH CHUNKY VOLTS in such a small dongle is difficult and
expensive, so doesn't happen, and the voltage swing might not be wide enough
for older devices. The other is in the software layer: the standards are a
mess and the full gamut of serial protocols are not available and/or not
implemented properly.
The physical connector and pinout is an irrelevance in comparison. I own a
soldering iron.
The 4k monitors that I've worked with have been
ultra high DPI. This means
that things that don't have DPI settings end up being tiny on the screen.
It works fine on MacOS, except for various garbage ports from Windows
(Audacity is the one which comes to mind first) using "cross-platform"
toolkits which ignore or misuse the native APIs. It's somewhat more
hit-and-miss on Linux because it relies a lot more on those toolkits a lot
more for GUI application software as there aren't so many native
alternatives. But hey, it's still less broken than Windows.
Windows is a curiously-heavyweight bootloader for Steam. It serves no other
useful purpose.
It's especially a problem if you try to mix non-4k
and 4k monitors.
Disregarding the aforementioned software deliberately trying to subvert it,
this again just works on the Mac: drag a window from one monitor to the
other and the window contents will change its DPI to match.
OK, sorry.
"Real" is for me here, physically the same connectors like
DB25/DB9/MMJ/etc ...
So how does that differ than a USB-to-RS-232 with the proper
passive
adapter to go from DB-9 to DB-25 / MMJ.