[Coco] DriveWire problem

[Aaron Wolfe]

On Sun, Feb 14, 2016 at 5:07 PM, Steven Hirsch <snhirsch at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> The DW GUI is showing pairs of messages:
>
> Sun Feb 14 2016 16:53:47.362  WARN   DWProtocolHandler   dwproto-0-9
>    Timed out reading from CoCo in OP_WRITE
>
> Sun Feb 14 2016 16:53:47.367  WARN   DWProtocolHandler   dwproto-0-9
>     OP_WRITE took 286ms.
>

This means the server is waiting for data from the CoCo and not getting it
within the expected time period.  Some operations like writing involve a
few back and forth exchanges between server and coco.  If either side takes
longer than ~250ms iirc then the other side is supposed to assume failure,
which is what the server is warning about.  It really shouldn't happen.
So... first thing I'd check is the serial cable itself for anything loose,
etc.  Some people have had this kind of result when the cable was just too
long.  OP_WRITE is one of few times the coco actually sends a lot of bytes
in a row over the wire so it can reveal a more general problem.

Some usb-serial adapters have settings that cause some number of bytes to
be queued up before they are delivered to the computer.  There is usually a
timeout where even a single byte will eventually get delivered, but with
just the wrong settings you could probably get this to happen even if all
the bytes are transmitted perfectly by the coco.  That, or any other kind
of serial port issue might be involved.  If you can verify the serial port
and cabling works fine that would be a good thing to do.