I'm curious what everyone else uses to connect to their various machines. Straw poll? Thoughts?
1) use a device with a REAL RS-232 UART. Not a USB/serial dongle. http://www.retrotechnology.com/memship/mship_usb.html Here's a somewhat busy note about using a FTDI-brand TTL-to-USB dongle, on a 8-bit microcomputer to a USB based modern computer. It references some other information too. But the problem I want to call out in general, is the "layers of character flow control" section of the document. The problem in brief, is that a USB serial dongle has its own buffers and hardware and software handshaking. It is a microcontroller after all. It's only vaguely controlled by the modern computer with the USB driver, which may or may not have user-means to operate. Most people use these dongles with old "terminal emulators" that think THEY have a buffer and some handshaking control of a UART. The USB driver arbitrates some of that, but not always well. It's all too busy, and generally means a slower sustained baud rate to avoid loss of characters. And for long runs of characters (like XMODEM) you get losses anyway. I think trying to run an 8-bit micro at 19.2K baud at length, is asking for trouble. But people get obsessed about high baud-rates. And certainly it's no fun, to transfer a file and find errors, even with XMODEM and other protocols. So - find a computer with a real, live, UART buried in it. They still exist. And in fact, that GPD MicroPC suggested, *has* (apparently) a RS-232 port. Too fancy for me, any 1990's laptop will do. Some of them still work well. Even some post 2000 laptops and desktops have serial ports. Use those, available from any industrial dumpster. Regards, Herb Johnson -- Herbert R. Johnson, New Jersey in the USA http://www.retrotechnology.com OR .net preserve, recover, restore 1970's computing email: hjohnson AT retrotechnology DOT com or try later herbjohnson AT comcast DOT net