telecomm with Emplant
4 messages in this thread
Help! I have an Emplant Deluxe, and want to use the Emplant's "A" serial
port from the Amiga side. I have the latest Emplant software version 5.0,
and am using empserial.device, unit 0, for that purpose. On AutoPilot and
BackTalk, my US Robotics Sportster 14,400 Modem works fine for reading and
writing messages, but simply will not download files. The CIS system sees
way to many errors, and cuts the download short with a "Too many NAKs"
message.
However, if I use MacCIM to download the same files, using the same port,
over the same modem, with exactly the same initiazation string, I can
download with no problems at all!
What's the problem? BTW the initiazation string I'm using is
AT&F1&B1&D0&H1&I0.
Any help would be appreciated, because I'd like to dedicate the Amiga's
native serial port to my MIDI system.
Also, using the same init string and the same modem from the native Amiga
port using serial.device works just fine, as well.
Ray Lewis ?|^)
Ray,
Get used to it. Whatever mods have been done to empser over
the years, it has never yet worked properly on the Amiga side. There
is a problem with the way the hardware handshake is handled. Early
versions of the device never did handshake. Try doing a connection
at or below 9600 baud with hardware handshake turned OFF and see if
it works OK. If it does, then they still have this problem. The
device doesn't actually come into play on the Mac side since if you
use empser, then you are running the Mac side through the Emplant
serial port. BTW be sure you have a TRUE hardware handshake cable on
the Mac side. Although the one that comes with the USR modem is
called a hardware cable, it isn't correctly wired. You can get a
TRUE cable from Celestin Company in Port Townsend, WA –
800-835-5514. Although you won't notice any problems running through
a terminal program, you will if you ever try to use TCP/IP, which
doesn't use the OS serial drivers like the term programs do.
Unfortunately, the right hardware handshake cable won't resolve the
problems with empser on the Amiga side. I was only able to resolve the problem
with an RS232 switchbox.
Using the newest empser.device, I _have_ been able to get it to work
from the Amiga side. I told my modem to give me all of its settings,
and found that some of them had, for some reason, been set to
software error correction. I reset all of them to factory defaults,
and, voila, it worked!
I _do_ get some naks when downloading, but not enough to cause an
abort. I might check out getting a for-sure hardware cable, tho.
That might eliminate all the naks.
If you haven't tried the latest empser.device, try again. I can have
AutoPilot go into CIS at 14,400, and it seems to work just fine now.
Ray Lewis ?|^)
Ray,
Wow!! I'm sure glad you seemed to get it finally to work. I, however,
sold my Amiga system before Emplant software version 5.0 was released, so I
never had a chance to check out the latest empser.device. The one that came
with 4.9, however, didn't work for me. I never could get any downloads to work
above 9600 baud. Do try a correctly wired hardware handshake cable for the
Emplant serial ports. It will surely help on the Mac side. It appears that
every cable I've gotten with any high speed modem was called a hardware
handshake cable by the modem company that supplied it, but every singel one of
them was missing one line. None of them were wired according to the schematic
supplied with the Emplant documentation. In my case until I got the correct
cable I couldn't use MacTCP and SLIP/PPP for internet dialups. And you can't
use the Amiga serial at all for that. For most terminal communications it
didn't seem to make any difference, so the problem wasn't apparent when using a
terminal program. BTW, apparently unless you have the correct hardware
handshake cable and use the Emplant serial port, you won't get any fax software
to work properly.
Steve