DavidM Posted June 8, 2018 Share Posted June 8, 2018 My Atari stuff was put away for a couple years and I recently got it back out and set it up. I have an Atarimax SIO2PC interface that I purchased many years ago. I was using it with an older PC that had serial ports on the mother board and WinXP previously and am now trying to use it with a newer PC that does not have builtin serial ports. I purchased a generic Chinese made serial PCI port card off Amazon that is using the WCH chip thinking it wouldn't matter what serial card I used. I have been unable to make it work with either APE or RespeQT. Both programs seem to recognize the SIO2PC, but APE fails to initialize it and RespeQT initializes, but the Atari doesn't see the PC drive when it boots. I got out the old WinXP PC to make sure the SIO2PC still works and was able to use it no problem. I did some searching on here and there's some indication that you need a true 65550 UART serial card for the Atarimax SIO2PC, but then other folks say they have it working with generic cards or USB-to-RS232 converters. I've tried everything I can think of with no luck. I'm just using the unregistered 3.0.2 version of APE if that matters. Anybody have any suggestions? Thanks. David Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JR> Posted June 8, 2018 Share Posted June 8, 2018 I tried a PCI card, and it worked, but couldn't handle the full range of POKEY divisors. I got this USB 2 RS232 cable and it works flawlessly all the way down to divisor 0. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00QUZY4L0/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o07_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DavidM Posted June 8, 2018 Author Share Posted June 8, 2018 Did you have to do anything special to get the USB converter to work? I've also tried a USB converter cable with no joy, but it used the PL2303 chip not the FTDI. Why is the Atarimax SIO2PC so finicky about the serial port? I would think a serial port is a serial port is a serial port in Windows once the driver is loaded, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I have a SIO2PC cable I made myself and could get that out if it will behave different than the Atarimax one. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JR> Posted June 8, 2018 Share Posted June 8, 2018 The FTDI chipset seems to be the key to get these to work best with USB. Seems to be the one best able to handle some of the oddball data rates that are needed to match the various POKEY speeds. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+kheller2 Posted June 9, 2018 Share Posted June 9, 2018 Did you have to do anything special to get the USB converter to work? I've also tried a USB converter cable with no joy, but it used the PL2303 chip not the FTDI. Why is the Atarimax SIO2PC so finicky about the serial port? I would think a serial port is a serial port is a serial port in Windows once the driver is loaded, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I have a SIO2PC cable I made myself and could get that out if it will behave different than the Atarimax one. I wouldn't say the SIO2PC is what is picky. The majority of USB->RS232 implementations do not support all the signals available on a real serial port.... and some products use those features. besides the afore mentioned speed/divisor clocking. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lemiel Posted June 9, 2018 Share Posted June 9, 2018 Prolific chip is bad. Use FTDI. VCP - Virtual COM usage is possible in WinAPE above 3.12 probably. Registered user could get update. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DavidM Posted June 18, 2018 Author Share Posted June 18, 2018 Played around a little more this weekend. I found a StarTech 16550 PCi express 2-port serial card on Ebay for cheap and it showed up Friday. I am still unable to get the SIO2PC to work. It does the same thing it did with the other card and USB converter. Pretty sure I saw a thread where somebody got the StarTech card to work, but not for me. So at this point I'm really wondering what is going on. I'm trying to get a serial card to work because I have 2 systems and 2 SIO2PC boxes and my idea is to hook one system to each serial port and just switch com ports in the software. Don't know what else to try so any suggestions on what to try are welcome.. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
_The Doctor__ Posted July 10, 2018 Share Posted July 10, 2018 you might be able to run 2 instances on separate serial ports... just be aware you will be limited standard 16550 divisor increments.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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