Maybe some of you guys can tell me if I’m beating a dead horse... Long ago I wrote some interface programs in Quick Basic (yes, that long ago) that sent a short data string, about 20 bytes or so, out serial port 1 or 2 (user selectable) so that it could be read by some other micro devices. The whole set-up was very simple; 8-N-1, 9600 baud with no handshaking. I was asked if the stuff could run on a newer Windows machine. I saw 2 problems: running an old DOS program in Windows and dealing with the absence of a serial port on a newer machine.

There seemed to be two possible solutions. I recalled some gamers using DosBox to run old games, looked online and found you guys and DosBox0.74. I installed DosBox and my application seemed to run fine. I then attached a USB to serial adapter to a USB port and tried to send a string with no good result - actually no result at all. I checked the set-up for the port to make sure it was the port number I had selected and was 8-N-1, 9600. I checked Device Manager and saw that supposedly the hardware was working fine. I tried to send data with and without hand-shaking, and also tried changing from port #1 to port #2. Finally I tried variations of the above using a null-modem adapter; still no go. As a last resort I tried using another Windows Machine: a desktop instead of a laptop, but both using Windows 7 as an operating system. Made no difference.

I got another computer and used a serial port utility program, COM-DEBUG, to see if I could send and receive a string using the USB port adapter. I could read what I sent from one computer to another by putting a test string into COM-DEBUG, but I couldn’t read a string sent from my application running in DosBox.

Can anybody tell me if I’m trying to do something impossible with DosBox or if I’m just missing a necessary piece of the puzzle? Thanks in advance for any attention you can give me.

Don Recklies