Greetings.
First, I have to say that I'm well impressed with the other RC entries - I've been checking the blogs and theres some impressive stuff going on. I think at the moment my favorite thing is the retrosketch - i think there could be a market for something like that...
Anyway, I havent given up on my own (now slightly modified) challenge. In fact today I tried something quite extreme (even more extreme than reading the documentation which as you know I've also had to resort to). I decided to NOT have a drink before starting my RC'ing.
I have been trying to figure out how to craft a cable that would provide the correct carrier detect and modem hangup signals for Warp6 and to be honest it was doing my head in. Despite several attempts, a bunch of googling, diagrams, pinouts, a hot soldering iron (you got to be careful with those after a couple of beers I've discovered) I was getting no where. Anyway, after tackling this again today (minus the beers first), I have now made a break through which is un-usual as normally beer enhances performance...
I began making a cable and was quickly to the point where I had comms, but no carrier detect or modem hangup (like the original cable). I thought I would attack the carrier detect issue first which seems to be where I went wrong (because it wasted so much time). I'm convinced now that the issue is that KEGS doesnt honor the DCD signal from the PC's DE9 COM port which is why I've been having so much trouble getting it to work - now of course I could be wrong about this because I did find some posts alluding that some people had managed to get a similar configuration working complete with DCD - not I however. In fact, in the end I got my multimeter out and measured the voltage on the DCD line on the KEGS serial port when I connected to the TCPSER virtual modem and then disconnected. The pin indeed toggled as I would have expected it to, however warp6 didnt react to the change in state.
Ok, so no DCD but what about modem hangup - this took all of two minutes to resolve - made the right connections on my cable and it just worked.
As it turns out from some testing, I think I can run with no DCD, whereas it would have been impossible to run with out modem hangup. From my testing, the worst thing that I think will happen if someone breaks the connection without logging out correctly is that the BBS will be unavailable until the inactive timeout period has expired (about 5 minutes by default I believe) - shouldnt be a big deal.
So I think I'm on track to get the BBS online. What I have to do now is just configure the BBS itself a little (get rid of some of the default response files etc) and I've found a small bug in the door launcher that stops it from working remotely which I'll have to fix (cause the whole point is to be able to play the door games!), so maybe later this week I'll have it online.
I really should take some pictures, I'm especially proud of my serial cable - if you could see it you'd all be convinced it's been my cable all along thats been giving me the grief ;-)
Right, off to bed with me.
First, I have to say that I'm well impressed with the other RC entries - I've been checking the blogs and theres some impressive stuff going on. I think at the moment my favorite thing is the retrosketch - i think there could be a market for something like that...
Anyway, I havent given up on my own (now slightly modified) challenge. In fact today I tried something quite extreme (even more extreme than reading the documentation which as you know I've also had to resort to). I decided to NOT have a drink before starting my RC'ing.
I have been trying to figure out how to craft a cable that would provide the correct carrier detect and modem hangup signals for Warp6 and to be honest it was doing my head in. Despite several attempts, a bunch of googling, diagrams, pinouts, a hot soldering iron (you got to be careful with those after a couple of beers I've discovered) I was getting no where. Anyway, after tackling this again today (minus the beers first), I have now made a break through which is un-usual as normally beer enhances performance...
I began making a cable and was quickly to the point where I had comms, but no carrier detect or modem hangup (like the original cable). I thought I would attack the carrier detect issue first which seems to be where I went wrong (because it wasted so much time). I'm convinced now that the issue is that KEGS doesnt honor the DCD signal from the PC's DE9 COM port which is why I've been having so much trouble getting it to work - now of course I could be wrong about this because I did find some posts alluding that some people had managed to get a similar configuration working complete with DCD - not I however. In fact, in the end I got my multimeter out and measured the voltage on the DCD line on the KEGS serial port when I connected to the TCPSER virtual modem and then disconnected. The pin indeed toggled as I would have expected it to, however warp6 didnt react to the change in state.
Ok, so no DCD but what about modem hangup - this took all of two minutes to resolve - made the right connections on my cable and it just worked.
As it turns out from some testing, I think I can run with no DCD, whereas it would have been impossible to run with out modem hangup. From my testing, the worst thing that I think will happen if someone breaks the connection without logging out correctly is that the BBS will be unavailable until the inactive timeout period has expired (about 5 minutes by default I believe) - shouldnt be a big deal.
So I think I'm on track to get the BBS online. What I have to do now is just configure the BBS itself a little (get rid of some of the default response files etc) and I've found a small bug in the door launcher that stops it from working remotely which I'll have to fix (cause the whole point is to be able to play the door games!), so maybe later this week I'll have it online.
I really should take some pictures, I'm especially proud of my serial cable - if you could see it you'd all be convinced it's been my cable all along thats been giving me the grief ;-)
Right, off to bed with me.