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First post, by Doctor Bob

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is there anything special to getting a serial adapter in a usb port to work in dosbox
i have an old dos program for vehicle communications & would like to get it working on my laptop, the program runs nicely but i cant seem to get any comms happening.
Cheers Rob

Reply 3 of 4, by taiken7

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Unfortunately due to some poor implementations (on the usb-serial side),
some timing specific hardware will not work; I purchased about 4 usb-serial
adaptors before I found one that would support some timing-sensitive apps.
Dosbox can't fix poor drivers/hardware.

* Ensure you are using the directserial parameter in the config (and a
version of dosbox that supports it).

Reply 4 of 4, by TeaRex

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Like taiken7 said, the one thing that is really hard to emulate right is round-trip time; some braindead protocols use very short timeouts which an emulated port (such as the one in your adapter) simply can't provide (unless and until someone comes up with way for software to accurately predict the future 😁) So in that case your only chance is either running a real DOS on a real computer with built-in ports or modifying your software and the firmware on the other side to use sane timeouts.

tearex