[Wine] Re: Any work done on the Com Ports?

roboknight roboknight at gmail.com
Mon Mar 19 00:47:44 CDT 2007


William wrote:
> No its not a sound card, External ham radio Scanner.   From all the
> other tests and ways I've had it run it just seems so close to working
> under wine.

Well, maybe it might work, but if it really does use that driver as it
appears, I don't believe it will work.  Maybe the driver is unrelated,
but since all you are really running is your ham radio software, it
would seem that it is not.  Since I don't know the software that well,
I can't really say much more other than that error seems to stem from
the driver being called for one reason or another.  If it is a ham
radio scanner, then maybe the driver supports the serial port protocol.
 It could be a simple filter driver or something, but it probably is a
bit more than that.


> I'm guessing its something to do with HAL.  Where the .sys files are
> accessing HAL directly.  It's weird how vmware actually does emulate a
> PC so well. I've even tried it with a USB-to serial and it works in VM
> and under regular PC but not in WINE.
>

VMWare emulates a PC so well because it does EXACTLY that:  emulate a
PC.  Cycle for cycle, instruction for instruction.  Wine does *NOT* do
this.  On purpose.  It is mainly used for running software that doesn't
really require that much outside hardware.  Think of wine more as a
Windows Translator.  It leaves the heavy work up to the running  OS.
Serial ports it can do.  Simple sound card stuff it can do.  Even
direct X because X I think has decent video support.  Like I said, I
don't know much about what your software's capabilities are, but my
suspicion is that Wine just won't support it because of that driver.
It probably isn't a serial issue.  As I said, your software could be
reporting erroneously that it can't find the com port because the other
driver fails.  Or maybe the driver is expecting some direct hardware
access to the serial port, which Wine *MIGHT* be able to provide (there
are some settings you used to be able to add to the old wine cfg file.
I think you can either add them to the registry or somewhere in
winecfg).  It is possible that "driver" really does just talk to the
serial port but supports the communications protocol.  Without
reversing the .sys file, I couldn't tell you what it needed.

> A terminal program won't really work.  I've tried talking to the WR
> directly like that but its really not a ansi device. Just so you know.
> I have tried terminal software threw WINE and to a modem with no
> problems. Using the same serial port.  That registry thing did the
> trick. So I know the com port communication is taking place.  Just not
> at the level I'm needing I guess.

I meant for just talking to the port, say connected to a simple
external modem if you still have one of those.  Or even, if you have
two serial ports, with a null modem cable between them.  Using the term
program on your radio, as you say, probably won't work, unless it has a
simple command based interface like a modem.  You just want to see that
your characters are actually going over the port.  That registry entry
is just that: a registry entry.  Unfortunately, software that probably
shouldn't depend on that entry for checking the comm port actually does
in reality.  Hence the need for the double check.

If it is possible to get the software working at all, you might try
looking up the direct serial access info from old wine info.  See if it
can still be configured with newer wine.

roboknight.



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