Eric,
I have a question about something you write here.
granted I was intending to connect my friend in California with Joseph
Norton, he wants to run freedos, but use a USB speech synthesizer.
If I follow what you say here, in theory at least, he could use this Linux
USB drivers for the actual hardware, but in an emulator, tell say his
screen reading program to use the simulated serial port?
Joseph has a build of freedos that uses something internal for speech.
still I was wondering how Freedos itself would, or if it could simulate
the same thing?
provide the DOS floor, add in a good USB dos driver, like the Panasonic
one I use, but simulate the serial port?
the serial port is needful, because the screen reader program uses it, not
necessarily a physical port, but the serial port address.
Does my question make sense?
Karen
On Sat, 7 Sep 2024, Eric Auer via Freedos-user wrote:
Hi Luke,
I am looking for information about getting a USB to RS-232 adapter to work
in the FreeDOS environment. This is the first step in a project to find an
alternative in programming legacy Motorola handheld and squad mobile
radios.
I guess the experts here are Bret Johnson and Georg Potthast.
My assumption is that such adapters implement a generic class of device,
so support might be possible without knowing the particular chipset, but
I also remember from Windows, that specific adapter cable chipsets only
have drivers for some Windows versions, contradicting generic support.
My understanding is that the software only runs in DOS and connects to the
radio via RS-232 serial. The local Motorola enthusiasts state these
devices
require the front-end program to run in an actual DOS environment and
cannot handle emulation.
That depends on which emulators those enthusiasts have tried so far.
I would assume that generic emulators like VMware or Qemu might not be
sufficiently optimized towards DOS, or might just lack the feature to
connect to a physical RS232 device, directly or through USB adapters.
However, I see no general reason why it should not work, so I would
suggest that you try DOS-specific emulators like DOSEMU2 or DOSBOX.
The advantage of using emulators is that they can use the USB drivers
of the host operating system (Linux, Windows, Mac) while presenting
a simulated classic RS232 port to DOS and the apps running there.
Depending on your planned expenses, you could also get a new or used
DOS-compatible computer with a physical RS232 port, which avoids all
USB issues. Most computers which still have a BIOS should work, while
computers which only support UEFI and no longer have a legacy BIOS
boot options are not suitable for running DOS directly on hardware.
Regards, Eric
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