[plug] PC/MCIA serial?

[Russell Steicke]

On Fri, Jul 05, 2002 at 12:02:19PM +0800, John Knight wrote:
> My dad's trying an experiment, he uses DOS for programming EPROMS or 
> something liek that. He needs  a slow machine for it, and a Pentium or 
> onwards just doesn't work, he needs a 486 or lower. What he's trying to do 
> is use a serial port on a laptop, which now days he needs an adaptor or PC 
> card for.

Does the eeprom burner program use delay loops for timing, and that's why
a faster machine is bad?

> Because he wants to use DOS, the experiment he's doing is using FreeDOS 
> under Linux (y'know, dos in a box), if all goes well, he'll become an 
> everyday Linux user, because he'll use it for the net instead of Windows. 
> Anyway, does anyone know if it'll work with no worries? The serial port I 
> mean, will that respond with no hassles?

It's actually dosemu that gives access to the hardware, and you run
freedos inside the virtual machine provided by dosemu.  www.dosemu.org has
fairly good docco on port access.  As long as the pc card presents a
standard looking serial port (8250 family uart at 0x3f8 irq4 for COM1, I
think) or the same hardware at a known address and irq so that you can
configure your DOS program to find it, then things should work fine.