Using a USB Serial Adaptor with Classic - HELP!!!

[crc-ict]

I wonder if any of the Mac experts here can help me...

One of our teachers would like to use an ancient Data Harvest control box with Flowol 2 on our Macs - Flowol has the right drivers, but the Mac doesn't have a suitable RS-232 connection.

To solve this, we have purchased a USB-Serial converter - a Prolific model. This has drivers for OS X and seems to work from there, but Flowol (which runs in Classic mode) can't see the port.

Does anyone know how I can get the USB connected serial port to show up in Classic? Can I install the OS 9 driver into the Classic system folder? Or is there some other way? I have the OS X driver installed at present.

I would be extremely grateful for any help.

Thanks,

Chris.

[crc-ict]

Sorry to bump this again, but I am a real tangle with this and am desperate to try and find solutions!

Anyone know of any good Mac specific forums where I might find some Mac gurus who will be friendly to a newbie?

Cheers,

Chris

[plexer]

Is it just one machine you want to use it on or more than one?

If only one can't you find an old pc to use?

Ben

[crc-ict]

No, it's only the one machine, but there is a tale behind this...

We have a mobile classroom of Mac laptops, and the kids are writing their programs in Flowol on the Mac and the teacher wants to then transfer their programs onto a machine with the control box and an IWB to demo it in real life.

Here lies the problem... the saved files from Mac Flowol cannot be opened by the Windows version! So we have to figure a way of connecting the serial control box (rather ancient - it has a connector for BBC computers!!) to legacy-free Macs! And to complicate things further, Mac Flowol is an old program and only runs in Classic mode!

[indie]

Hmm, i think you might need native drivers for Classic and install just classic on the machine and boot into that.

I don't think classic inside OS X will see the COM port created by the OS X drivers i'm afraid.

[plexer]

Ah yes I do remember the tale from earlier.

I think indie's suggestion is the way to go in that case.

Ben

[crc-ict]

Hmm, i think you might need native drivers for Classic and install just classic on the machine and boot into that.

I don't think classic inside OS X will see the COM port created by the OS X drivers i'm afraid.

Thanks Indie.

Is it possible to boot the machine from Classic at start-up without removing OS X? There are other uses for the machine which will prevent us from wiping it and installing only Classic/OS 9. And also, we have neither licences nor disks for OS 9.

[sahmeepee]

You might also want to speak to the Data Harvest people. We needed to use USB on new laptops for Sensing Science software and they warned us that not all serial-USB convertors are made equal and many won't work. They also sold serial-USB convertors, which made the skeptic in me suspicious!

I bought a cheap serial-USB convertor to test and sure enough they were right, so we bought a load of theirs at about £5 or £10 more. I won't say they worked straight away (XP drivers and science software equally cr''p) but we did get them working.

[plexer]

Absolutely same experience here with the data harvest stuff. We bought 2 different lots of other usb serial adapters before we stumped up for the actual data harvest ones.

I had tried some that worked but then I bought more and they didn't.

Ben