[MiNT] MiNT problems and serial ports

[Mario Becroft <mb@gem.win.co.nz>]

I have just installed the MiNT version 1.15.9 and there seem to be a few
problems on my TT. For now I've gone back to version 1.15.6 which at least
works.

The main problem is that whereas using MiNT version 1.15.9 the serial
ports do not work. Data sent to a serial port never seems to be actually
sent. Under MiNT version 1.15.6 there is no problem. Apart from MiNT,
HSMODEM was also installed and loads before MiNT.

I also tried the latest scc.xdd from Frank and the one from ozk (having
first disabled HSMODEM). However in both cases I observed the same
problems that I have mentioned in the past which also renders the serial
ports unusable. Namely, although pppd works on a serial port, every other
program that I have tried has problems, for example vgetty and uucp. The
symptoms are that the program will talk to the modem briefly, but then
hang while waiting to receive data from the modem, even though the modem
HAS sent data to the computer. For example vgetty will send a command like
"AT" to the modem, and wait for "OK". But although the modem has responded
with OK, vgetty never sees it.

I did some investigation into those problems some months ago but I can't
remember exactly what I found out. However, if I remember correctly the
problem seemed to be that read() on a serial port does only work if
reading 1 character. If reading more than 1 character with a single call
to read(), it just blocks indefinitely even if data is available on the
serial port.

Unfortunately I didn't have time to get to grips with how the scc.xdd
operates and I was not able to fix the problem, although I did narrow
down somewhat where in scc.xdd the problem was occuring. If anybody wants
to work on the problem I would be happy to dig up what information I had
gathered.

-- 
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Mario Becroft           * Tariland, New Zealand Atari User Group      |
| mb@gem.win.co.nz        * Atari Hardware Developments                 |
| http://gem.win.co.nz/   *             >>> NEW MIDI-3 <<<              |
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