

The other device would then use another handshaking pin to tell it to send whatever it wanted to send. In the past, there was no duplex mode, so if a computer wanted to send something it had to tell the other device or computer that it was about to transmit, using one of the hardware handshaking pins. There are a few other pins, used for hardware handshaking. Most serial ports run in a duplex mode-that is, they can send and receive simultaneously. There is a transmitting pin (for sending information away) and a receiving pin (for getting information). A DB-25 has most of the pins as ground pins or simply unconnected, whereas a DE-9 has only one ground pin. This Wikipedia page has more information on the plug used.īoth have the same basic types of pins. They plug in to your computer using a female plug (unless your computer is odd and has a female port, in which case your cable will need a male plug). The 9-pin ones are called DE-9 (or more commonly, DB-9 even though DE-9 is its technical name) and the 25-pin ones are called DB-25. 9-pin is smaller and is used more often though in the past the 25-pin ones were used more often. 25-pin ports are not any better, they just have more pins (most unused) and are bigger. There are actually two kinds of serial port: 25-pin and 9-pin. The Wikipedia page on Serial ports has a lot of information, and it is summarised here.

It is common for operating-system developers to use a system's serial ports for debugging purposes, since they do not require sophisticated hardware setups and are useful for transmitting information in the early stages of an operating-system's initialization.
#Android dosbox serial port drivers#
Serial ports are of particular interest to operating-system developers since they are much easier to implement drivers for than USB, and are still commonly found in many x86 systems. The DE-9 interface is the one most commonly used connector for serial ports in modern systems. Modern serial ports typically implement the RS-232 standard, and can use a variety of different connector interfaces.

This is the hardware chip responsible for encoding and decoding the data sent over the serial interface. Serial ports are typically controlled by UART hardware. Historically it was common for many dial-up modems to be connected via a computer's serial port, and the design of the underlying UART hardware itself reflects this. Use of serial ports for connecting peripherals has largely been deprecated in favor of USB and other modern peripheral interfaces, however it is still commonly used in certain industries for interfacing with industrial hardware such as CNC machines or commercial devices such as POS terminals. Serial ports are a legacy communications port common on IBM-PC compatible computers.
