Hi guys


As I haven't posted here before: I'm Remo, and I already like your forum a lot. It helped me with several questions, but now I'm at a point I can't answer by looking at older posts so I'd like to ask directly.

My setup:
We've got an old PowerPC running MacOS 8.5.1 in the lab which is used to control a device (a 96-well-plate-reading spectrophotometer). The device is connected to either the modem or the printer port and has a DB-25 RS-232C connector on the device side. The device has handshakes toggled off and works with 9600 baud. It works perfectly fine with the old computer.

What I would like to do:
The Mac is getting old, and can't access our smb servers anymore. One possibility would be to just use ftp or something like that, but we'd like to use a new computer to control the device so we can save space and have redundancy in case the old mac would have a hardware failure.
The software used to control the scanner just works on classic Mac environments and the only contemporary version of this software would run on Windows and costs a lot.

Where I am so far:
So I've got SheepShaver running MacOS 8.5 and 9.0.4 on a MacOS X host. I'm testing on a Snow Leopard system, but the final system controlling the device for the next couple of years would run Tiger. I also test on the Tiger system in parallel.
I've connected two kinds of RS-232 to USB converters. One is using a Prolific chip, the other one is a Belkin F5U103, with the major advantage of having the DIN-8 port used by the macs.
I manged to set up both of the converters to control an old RS-232 modem. I use ZTerm to send AT commands from within the client system and the modem responds (via the cu-device)

However, the device software just won't connect, giving me the error messages "0" and "-28", printer/modem port could not be opened (for the cu device) or just freezes (using the tty device). If I change the baud rate in the host system, it gets changed back if I want to connect through the software, so something seems to be happening.
I also tried to intercept traffic, but to no avail.


We don't have the original software anymore, but I copied it from the old mac to SheepShaver.


So, do you guys have any idea what I could try or what the problem might be? Since the whole serial connection works, I think I'm very close to solving the problem. Are there drivers in old Mac systems (I have no idea about old MacOSs)? What could I try to copy or change?


Regards,
Remo

I fear that you will not succeed to set this up with SheepShaver. SheepShaver is not aware of the USB ports on the host machine and as far as I know, SheepShaver does not emulate the printer/modem serial ports.

Hi,
first I have to admit that I never used serial devices with SheepShaver.
If had to, I would take a stock PC box with a serial port on it and XP or GNU-Linux as SS host for testing.
Many low end motherboards still have serial connectors on board, although there quite often is no interface on the box.
But that is an easy fix for approx. EUR 2,50. If you should need a DB25m > DB25f serial cable, you can have a spare one
of mine from a V56 modem.
Assigning the PCs serial ports to SS is said to be working. Not working will be USB devices, as SS is not aware of those.
Of course you can use USB disks via the hosts shared folder with SS, but thats about all.

Good luck!

Hi guys


Thank you very much for your reply. The idea with the PC box came to my mind as well. I recently set up a PC using one of these neat Atom boards, a D510MO by Intel. As you said, this board still has the serial connectors, but with no DB-9 interface, but that wouldn't be a big deal to solder one on.

So I'll probably give this solution another last shot.

What still astonishes me however, is the fact that I'm able to send AT commands to the modem. Also, the devices that are handed over to SheepShaver are not USB devices, but virtual serial ports, and don't need drivers, since the whole translation should happen within the MacOS host.

Very strange. So, I'll give it a shot with the Windows solution and if that doesn't work, I'll probably give up.

Very interesting your virtual serial ports, may be you should not give up too soon, as your modem responds correctly to AT.
I am running SS with a Atom netbook occasionally, but would not recommend it for every day usage.
Any dual core Athlon or Pentium 2GHz cpu would do fine and Mandriva is a good host for SS (and free).
There are some Biostar mobos around, that at least have the pins for serial ports.
I am needing glasses for soldering already, so I would only do that if I must :-).

Hi,

I assume you installed the drivers for the adapter in OSX?
In sheepshaver, have you tried disabling appletalk, or to set it to use the ethernet (even if it doens't exist)

It seems there are also many drivers for usb-serial adapters that can be installed in OS 9. I don't know if they are helpfull in any way, but if they do something for the serial port software in OS 9, then perhaps you get lucky.

I found OS 9 drivers for e.g., FTDI chips http://www.ftdichip.com/Drivers/VCP/Mac ... E2.sit.hqx
also some here: http://serialio.com/download/Drivers/USB_RS232_OS9.zip

Is this of any use? http://www.planet-rcs.de/article/mac_serial_port/

Best,
Cat_7

Is there a way I can force continuous polling of a virtual serial driver? I found that (to my surprise), Newton debugging through Hammer will work through the USB port, by setting the serial port in SS to the virtual port that the FTDI driver sets up (tty.usbserial-A900ghoD). Except for one thing - the FTDI chip/driver seems to buffer anything the Newton sends, until I initiate a command from the Mac [SS] side. So I can connect Hammer, but then if I execute a 'write(<string>) statement on the Newton to send something back over the serial link, nothing will show up until I send a new command from Hammer (in this case the easiest thing seems to be to send 'SetDebugMode(true)'), at which time Hammer's console spits out whatever string the Newton sent back (perhaps multiple strings).

Oddly, Newton Connection does somehow poll continuously until you select Connect in the Dock application on the Newton - and it works fine. So I assume that NCU somehow keeps the driver open and Hammer doesn't (polling versus asynchronous?) I know that SS (or at least an earlier version) didn't support async serial interrups, so if it is using that function, I'm out of luck. But if the FTDI driver is basically shutting down or idling, is there something I could do at the OSX level to keep the driver active all the time instead of just when SS accesses it (assuming that's what's happening).

Jim

My knowledge of the intricacies of Mac OS do not reach a level that would allow to give you an answer to that question.
However, I find this http://www.tripplite.com/shared/techdoc ... 933020.pdf in relation to async communication. You can search the pdf for "async".

Best,
Cat_7