Hello,
I made it back to the shop with my e-tech pci56-rwm and the receipt, and
they told me something about winmodems, hardware modems and "old fashioned"
modems. (Best go for the last ones).
The winmodems use the main CPU (see Steves description below), the modern,
PnP PCI "hardware" modems have their own CPU, but no UART, and the old ones
have all on board. The e-tech rwm is supposed to work with a PNP aware
linux, as well as win9x.
Not with dos, however, unless there's some utility to communicate with the
bios during startup. A software driver seems really nessecary to use this
modem, possibly since a "modem enumerator" is installed together with a
load of voice-fax-whatever drivers. A software UART though, might be more
or less standardised, and thus available for linux (But what manufacturer
would be motivated to provide such for DOS)
>From: Steve <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To expand... it's actually the UART chip which winmodems are
>missing. (Universal Asynchronous Reciever Transmitter) This chip
>sends signals *through* the serial port. It isn't a "comport"
>itself.
>
> An internal modem has its own UART onboard. An external modem
>uses the UART on the motherboard which is associated with the
>serial port in use, and of course a "winmodem" / "software modem" /
>"modem emulator" simply has no UART at all.
>
> Instead of using a hardware UART, it uses a software UART
>emulator, which puts load on your CPU that should rightfully be
>delegated a separate hardware UART. (Bill Gates refers to this
>as "using excess CPU cycles"... as if IE is such a lightweight
>app that it leaves the CPU sitting their idling... ehem)
>
Considering the compaq video card (and of course compaq is widely used for
standardising speed indexes in norton and other tech software) I just
wondered why this one won't be recognised. There is a Trident chip on it
(if I'm not mistaken; maybe a cirrus, but surely one well known brand) and
win95 uses a standard compaq.drv. Maybe I should just wait for Michael to
declare arachne 1.70 stable.
But now for something completely sightly different (and I don't know wether
it has to do with national telephone specs): Does anyone know why a
telephone plug has either 2 or 4 wires, and both plug types can be used
combined, with no warnings or explanations, until a modem connected with 4
wires downs the whole phone line after a phone has interrupted a
ppp-connection some times? (As if this interruption has blown a circuit in
the "extra" two lines in the modem; all works fine after the crash, but
only with a two wire line, while before there wasn't a problem with any
connector or line.)???
(Dutch telephone comes traditionally through a 4 wired line, in which the
middle 2 are red and green and are the ones actually used. The other 2 are
usually yellow and black. Cables provided with telephones or modems usually
have just the middle wires connected, but cables bought seperately -like
the 10 meters I used- have all 4. No difference was noticed, before a 4
wired cable "blew" the modem which just may have something to do with
picking up a phone on the same line, and I've not tested it's replacement
with such a cable yet...)
Anyway, now I can use arachne in real dos mode through an external 14k4 on
com2 with the 4 wired line to it, win95 uses an internal e-tech 56k which
connects with 2 wires through the 14k4, The compaq card renders 640x480x16
only (not even 800x600x16 :-(, but maybe a vesa driver for dos would exist.)
Bart
