[Coco] Drvewire USB 2 Serial question

[Gene Heskett]

On Tuesday 18 September 2012 14:18:16 Bill Pierce did opine:

> Hi guys,
> I've been helping Lester Hands get his Coco going with Drivewire. We
> have it going, all seems to be well except for one problem When using
> Drivewire, whether to boot Nitro or just use VHDs in HDBDOS, sometimes
> it just doesn't work. He's using a USB 2 Serial adapter and a cable
> from Cloud9. We've tried both Drivewire 4 as well as 3 and HDBDOS 1.1 -
> 1.4. I remember someone saying they had problems with the USB adapters
> and someone else had a fix. I just don't remember who it was, what the
> problem was or the fix. As I said, sometimes it works fine... then
> other times it fails. Especially in booting Nitro Any ideas?
> 
> Thanks
> Bill P

I may be one of the folks who has noted adapter problems, specifically the 
Prolific pl2303's.  I had 2 of them way back when, but when it became 
obvious that USB was here to stay, I gradually cycled those to a nail on 
the wall to be only used in case of dire emergency.  They are very fond of 
throwing away the first byte of a USB packet, so the checksum fails, the 
device disconnects and then goes completely through the rediscovery 
process, which takes anywhere from 10 to 30 seconds.

I changed them out for FDTI stuff and I could suddenly talk to my UPS's 
with "nut" very dependably.

ATM I have some very long booster/extension cables from here to the coco 
desk in the basement.  They are reported by lsusb (this is linux) as:

Bus 001 Device 005: ID 048d:1336 Integrated Technology Express, Inc.

And one of those is handling both the coco3 & drivewire4 as well as a 
brother B&W laser printer plugged into a 7 port hub on the far end of that 
15 meter cable.  At a speed sufficient to keep a 22ppm printer fully 
occupied.

Cheers, Gene
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