Hi Bob,

 BL>           I'm writing a Windows comms package, trying to make it as
 BL> simple as possible and I have the following questions:
 BL>
 BL> 1.  Everyone specifies n, 8, 1 for no
 BL> parity, 8 bits, 1 stop-bit. Does
 BL>    anyone ever use anything else?

Yes.  Some of the banking and other "videotext" services use 7 data
bits with even parity.
Compu$erve is also an oddity in that it uses 7bits with no parity (for
its text based logons).

 BL> Can I simply hardwire it in?

You can, but you will be locking out its use with some of the lesser
used services as above.

 BL> 2.  Why would anyone use XON/XOFF
 BL> software in preference to RTS/CTS?
 BL>    Can I hardwire that in, too?

RTS/CTS is a hardware flow control, and not all computers support it,
however, since you are assumedly only writing this prg for the IBM &
clones then *I* can't see a problem of "hardwiring" it ...  hmm, on
seconds thoughts, not all modems suport RTS/CTS either, so you could
run into problems there ...  but such modems are quite rare these
days.. and the 9600bps and above at least.

 BL> 3.  Why wouldn't you drop-DTR to hang up? You can always send ATHO.
 BL>    Can I hardwire that too?

Same arguements as for the CTS/RTS.

 BL>  It seems to me that the only variations
 BL> I have to allow are the COM
 BL> port, the baud rate, and the buffer size.
 BL> Even there, why not set the
 BL> rate at 56000 permanently,

Without a 16650  UART some of the slower computers can't cope with
56k  (my 486/25 laptop being one such example).
Then there are the 28k modem users, that are generally better of using
115k/bps for a modem/computer speed.  You really do need this one as a
user option.

Cheers,
Rod

___ QWKRR128 V4.51 [R]
@EOT:

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