19.2K on a 3b1

[C M Votava]

DoN Nichols writes:
>                           Let's face it, there just isn't much muscle for
>handling interrupts at the rate that 19.2k requires.  (I'd love for an
>intelligent serial card with its own dma to be produced for the system (with
>appropriate drivers).

Well, an interesting project would be to take the DOS-73 board, any of the many
available public domain RS-232 software drivers available, toss the DOS 3.1 OS
(et. al.), and write some "glue" code to come up with your own intelligent
serial card for running RS-232 at various speeds. Actually, it's not as easy
as it sounds (I've looked into it a bit), but I think that using the DOS-73
interface description from the maintenaince manual, and an assembly language
RS-232 driver, it is possible to do. You'd also have to write a device driver
to talk to it, the first crack at it could be farly "simple minded"
reserving the complicated garbage (line disiplines, etc.) for later.

Taking this project further, it would be nice for this thing to be able to
interface with DOS boxes running programs like "Brooklyn Bridge". What this
program does is allow you to connect 2 DOS boxes together via the RS232
connections, and changes the baud rate to somewhere around 115K to transfer
information. One machine ends up being the "slave" and one is the "master".
I haven't even looked into this much, but it sounds interesting on the surface.

Anybody game?

-Craig