🚀 go-pugleaf

Henry Griggs (hgriggs@mpx.com.au) wrote:
: Stuart Park (stuart@psd.com.au) wrote:
: : : everything between the mouse and the modem and the network card, the
: : : scanner, the Soundblaster the cdrom and tape backup, there's nothing left.
: : 
: : Using all of those and not using SCSI is just asking for trouble.

: I agree. And one day I am going to move as much to SCSI as I can. When
: I can afford it. But in the meantime, it mostly works without too much
: hassle. Now that I've worked out that I _can_ set up serial terminals
: and I am discovering how useful they are (and fun), now is the first
: time that I am inconvenienced by the IRQ problem. So I'm thinking of
: doing something about it. And an intelligent serial card looks to me
: like the first step. What do you reckon?

Depending on how confident you are with PCB hacking skills, you could always
hack a serial port to use, say, IRQ 10. Just get hold of the pin
assignments of the ISA bus (Shouldn't be hard to find on the net..) and then
cut the IRQ 4 line on com3 and resolder it to IRQ 10. Linux won't have any
problems with this, as long as you use setserial to set your IRQs. Can't say
as much for m$-windows.

The next-cheapest option is to go out and buy a dedicated serial card. I
bought one about a year ago for around $30, with 2x16550s, each configurable
to IRQ 2,3,5,7,9,10,11,12,14,15. I had no problems at all running 4 serial
ports at 4,3,11,10

 -= Mark Stiebel