[Coco] DW serial timing issue.... and a bug for the total commander plug in.

[Aaron Wolfe]

If the computer is crashing during serial I\O, something is very unhappy.
It may be outside of the realm that DW can effect.  Any kind of timing
settings are going to be a function of the driver, DW just makes high level
"generic" calls to the OS, nothing beyond the usual "please open the device
at 115.2k, now please spit these bytes at it".  Since the coco serial port
doesn't implement fancy things like flow control there is really very
little to it.

Some Windows serial drivers do provide timing, buffering and other
adjustments.  These can be configured via the device manager when they are
available, but its up to the individual driver to offer and implement
them.  Looking at the properties of the driver page for the port in device
manager should reveal any that are available.
I honestly wouldn't think any combination of settings would cause or
correct an error that is causing the machine to blue screen, though.

If you have or can borrow a USB serial adapter, you could eliminate several
possibilities by seeing if it behaves the same way or not.  Might also want
to shorten the serial cable wherever possible or investigate things like rf
interference or even grounding problems.  Unfortunately I dont know of
anything a serial port can do that would crash a properly functioning
system, so it may just be a buggy driver.  There some truly awful serial
devices out there, though Ive never heard of trouble with one in a docking
station.  You may want to make sure you have the latest drivers if you
haven't already.  Although, if its a knockoff FTDI devices then the latest
drivers might intentionally be causing these issues too.  Sorry I dont have
any better insight, I've not heard of a similar issue so far.

On Oct 27, 2014 8:16 PM, "Chris Ahrendt" <chrisahrendt at bellsouth.net> wrote:
>
> I have an interesting issue with the latest DW thats out there for
download.
> I am on a laptop connected to a usb docking station with built in serial
(on the docking station)
> and such.
> I connect my DW cable up to my coco3 and when I do a diskcopy from DW to
a physical disk my laptop
> BSD's (its a generic driver that it traps in). If I go in and set up the
built in utility to determine which driver
> is having the issue then the trap never occurs.
>
> However either way I run DW and windows 7 the diskcopy from the physical
drive on the coco to the virtual
> drive on DW still fails with an I/O error.
>
> Any settings that can be adjusted on DW to adjust the timing to the coco
3?
>
> Second issue....
> I used the coco total commander plugin for 32 bits to write to a coco
disk....
> when I write text files to the blank .dsk image or .bas files... the coco
has no issues reading the file.
> If the file is a binary file (.bin) anytime you try and load the file the
coco gets a fm error...
>
> Ideas? What other application would let me create a dsk file so that I
can move the drive wire rom to a physical coco disk....
>
>
> Chris
>
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