DN> If you have 8 com ports in your system and wish to run 8 copies of you
DN> COM program on the same machine in a multi-tasking environment, and yo
DN> know the addresses and IRQ's for all 8 ports then all you need to do i
DN> in each program is poke the appropriate address into the BIOS data tab
DN> (say in COM1) and open the port with the correct IRx setting.
 
Well, I'm not running a multi-tasking environment...  I just have one
application that utilizes a bunch of rs-232 ports (we are running an
experiment which has 5 devices connected to rs-232, as well as a serial
postscript printer, plus it has a/d, d/a etc boards in it).  For the
other 2 com ports I just used inp and out; it would have been nice to
have used PB's internal code though, but no biggie.  Luckily having
interrupt driven comm code for the printer and one of the devices is
not needed so inp and out work great.  of course we have already talked
about this before.  btw, just why is supporting more than 4 comm ports
simultaneously such a hassle?  it seems like if we give PB the base
address and IRQ# it should just treat it like com1-com4; instead of
reading bios for base address it just uses the value we pass to it. 
just wondering as you said it would be a giant hassle.    eric
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