News from Mac OSX - Mysterious Serial Port

Stephen Quinn Barncard stephenREVOLUTION at barncard.com
Fri Aug 22 08:32:00 EDT 2003


Rather than destroy a cable or mess with those horrible mini-dins, I 
would use a mini-din to DB-9 adaptor (still available), then wire a 
DB-9 Female (or male, i forgot). Those adaptors were originally made 
for the 128k mac, but for some reason are still around.

My first Hypercard project was a control system for up to 156 
cassette decks run by a little Mac SE (later a IIci) back in 1989 at 
A&M Studios. The only way to do that was to use the serial port at 
the mac end and a CY232 chip from Cybernetics at the hardware end. I 
got serial XCMDs off of Genie and other BBs, and eventually used 
Hyperbasic and Compilit to speed things up...

Another mac in the room drove a printer system to make the cassette 
labels -- 6 Epson impact printers with buffers and switching. What a 
trip that was. It took a lot of delays and trickery to get those damn 
ports to work right. I also designed all the analog and digital 
hardware and scanning concept.

http://barncard.com/amstudios/htdoc/Pages/TC.html

>
>I don't know why I asked which one.
>
>On DB9 and DB25, if you don't need handshaking, just connect pin 2 
>to pin 3.  If you need handshaking on DB9, connect 7 to 8, and pin 4 
>to 6 and 1.  If you need handshaking on DB25, uh, I forgot--I can 
>look it up.
>
>On the Mac DIN, you get an old mac serial cable and cut it.  Strip 
>the wires.  Find those that go to certain pins and then solder or 
>connect together like this:
>
>Pin 3 to 5
>Pin 6 to 8
>
>This takes two because the signal is on two wires and not one.
>
>If you need handshaking, try 1 to 2.  I have not done that.
>
>If you blow something up, uh, somehow it is not my fault.  There are 
>lots of web pages that have info on this; double check with those.
>
>Dar Scott
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