I just did a search on eBay for a Belkin F3x171-10. Only listing that came up was selling for $50. Yeah, not going to happen. I'll look around to see if anyone sells the cable for a reasonable price, but chances are high I'll end up making up a DB25-to-DB9 cable set. I sure wish I hadn't thrown out the one I made years ago, back when I was actively working with my M100. Live and (probably never) learn.
I'll give HTERM a try. I had forgotten about utf-8 coding. Thanks for the reminder. Thanks, John. -----Original Message----- From: John R. Hogerhuis <jho...@pobox.com> To: Model 100 Discussion <m100@lists.bitchin100.com> Sent: Thu, Apr 27, 2017 1:23 pm Subject: Re: [M100] Questions regarding Full Null Modem Cables, specif Serial to USB On Thu, Apr 27, 2017 at 10:10 AM, Paul Bucalo <pm...@aol.com> wrote: I was hoping for a rationale based on experience, i.e., USB works well or not at all. Doesn't really matter much. Most likely I will make up a new cable using DB25-to-DB9. My favorite cable is the full-null belkin serial laplink cable, if you can find one. Never had a problem with any of them, ever. f3x171-10, but they are hard to find these days though they were very cheap for a while. To use with Model T, you need to have a db-25 gender changer. But generally, you need a full-null cable. I wouldn't go with 3 wire cables since you may want to experiment with hardware flow control (HTERM, my bare bones / dumb terminal to Linux) given that you hook to Linux which overruns the Model T 64-byte serial buffer when using software flow control. Also Linux utilities throw in UTF-8 and lots of formatting codes. HTERM maps to/from utf-8 and strips ANSI color escapes, stuff like that. One thing to be aware of is some cables bump into the Model100 case and keep it from mating properly. You may have to shave some off the housing to make it fit, or ideally find one that fits into the space available, after adding the thin-hood gender changer. USB on the PC side is fine. I recommend only devices with FTDI chipsets, however (not Prolific). The FTDI drivers generally allow more configurability which ends up being necessary with TS-DOS (TS-DOS loves to time-out... remember USB serial devices have a tendency to delay/collect bytes to "efficiently" send a larger packet). -- John.
