Thanks to Rich Mellor, who managed to source a Hermes chip, I can now confirm that the Ser-USB will work on a standard QL fitted with Hermes at speeds up to 19200 baud. It is still necessary to load the asynchronous I/O module (the Queue Manager), though. This takes up an extra 5K of RAM.
It had been my intention to withdraw support for the Ser-USB on standard QL hardware, but after receiving some feedback on that, I went back to the code to see if there was anything that could be done to at least create something that was stable enough to be used with some limitations in that environment. I believe that effort has been successful; this was the result: - The problem of executable files being corrupted when read back using asynchronous I/O has been fixed, after eventually having been traced to some erroneous pointer arithmetic. - Out of order Trap #3 requests no longer cause the driver to abort. Instead, the driver attempts to gracefully bring the "abandoned" request to completion, deferring any other pending requests until the process is completed. Both of these issues only affected asynchronous I/O, but when combined they made the driver unreliable on systems that required that functionality. Many thanks to everyone who pointed me at the SimSer serial driver as a possible solution. I did spend some time looking at this, but as it only enhances the functionality of the unidirectional channels (SRX and STX) I was not able to immediately make use of its capabilities without quite a bit of rewriting. It does have some very useful features, though, and I will look at providing support for them in a later version of the driver. So . Ser-USB will be supported on base QL hardware, after all. However, without Hermes or (better still) superHermes you will be limited to 4800 baud. There will be an announcement at the beginning of May on the availability of the hardware and its pricing, before which I will be in touch with anyone who has already enquired about purchasing a Ser-USB. Adrian _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
