Hello, I decided to port a DOS program (written in BP7) to Linux, because it becomes hard and harder to maintain it since I completely changed to Linux. Because this program actually controls my central heating, this is a good project for summer time, where I have no pressure to get it uninterrupted working. To give some overview: This program uses a TSR driver named "FOSSIL", driver name X00.SYS, which actually does the whole low-level stuff and has some very smart features built in, like: - supporting up to 8 serial ports (in DOS !!!) - having big buffers for sending and receiving - allowing me to transfer particuar characters or a whole block of data into or from the buffer - allowing me to test how many bytes are in every buffer and how much space is free (before doing a block transfer) - allowing me to set easily communication parameters like baud-rate, parity, num of start-/stopbits, kind of handshaking, ... - allowing me to flush buffers (erases all content of the Tx or Rx buffer) - directly control and test control lines (rise/lower DTR, RING, ...)
Actually, this X00 driver was written for BBS systems with analog modems around 1970-1980, namely for MAXIMUS and OPUS. This BBS programs were the best ones at their time as far as I can remember, of course, at that time there was no real Internet available to the public. ;-) So I took this driver, because it made my life easy: Actually I didn't have to do much more than loading the TSR (here I could pass some parameters to it, i.e. how many serial ports - and which ports - it should take over, then I simply loaded my program. My program was talking through a SW-Interrupt with the X00 driver, tested its presence, and was then able to exchange data smoothly at any desired speed. Perfect for me. Michael Van Kanneyt told me a few days ago that there is some sort of TSerial available, but he has no details at hands, because he didn't use it. But he mentioned that some people are using it. Can somebody, please, give me more details on TSerial, what it can (not) do, maybe a little "hello world" using it, and so forth? I definitely need buffering and the possibility to empty a buffer, test if it is empty (=everything was/is sent), and to see its content (how much is currently inside, to see if dataflow is actually happening or not). Of course, everything must work non-blocking. Please, be so kind and help. I have a book about FreePascal (from Michael), but this book is too old and does not cover all the new functions of FreePascal, so it is somewhat problematic to me, because I write programs without an IDE and/or Lazarus. mfg Ing. Rainer Hantsch _______________________________________________ fpc-pascal maillist - fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-pascal
