All,

Is there anyone out there who would like to help with the beta testing of
the Ser-USB 2.0 drivers?

There are two drivers:

"Destiny" for QL emulators only. (Supports JM, JS, MG, Minerva, SMSQ).

"Legacy" for legacy black box QLs with standard SER ports, Hermes or
superHermes, running QL ROM versions from JM to Minerva. (Available as a ROM
or LRESPR version).

Note: There is currently no official version of the driver for SMSQ on QL or
clone hardware, although users have reported that the Legacy driver works.

Most of the development work has gone into producing the Legacy Driver.
Recently, I had taken the decision to limit this driver to Minerva users,
but realised that it would be better to release no new driver at all than a
driver which only works with one ROM version. Consequently, the Legacy
driver _must_ be proved to work on all common ROMs or there will be no
version 2 Ser-USB driver for legacy hardware - and that will be the end of
driver development for the Ser-USB!

The latest Legacy version does some things internally that I really didn't
want to do in order to run under JM/JS/MG but as it's a "Do or Die"
situation I decided that these measures were necessary. At the moment it's
working well here on a JS test QL.

Ser-USB 2.0 Legacy is the first driver to run entirely from a 16K ROM with
no overlays; the Queue Manager is gone (finally!)  It is also the first
Ser-USB driver that allows the QL to boot from an SD Card or USB Drive.

Known Issues:

DESTINY: None. (which means there are some ... but nobody has found them
yet!)

LEGACY: On ROMs other than Minerva, S*BASIC window #1 will appear with the
size and position of the window used to display the copyright message on the
startup screen. This is because the ROM code makes assumptions about channel
numbers that don't hold true if a serial channel was opened to load the
Ser-USB driver. The fix is to use Toolkit II's WMON command or similar,
which puts the windows in the right position. I cannot fix this in the
driver.

If anyone wants to test these new drivers, please drop me a line. You'll
need a Ser-USB or a properly connected USBWiz module.




Adrian
www.memorylanecomputing.com


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