[Lazarus] Transfer between RS232 and TCP/IP

[wkitty42 at windstream.net]

On 07/22/2016 12:34 PM, Bo Berglund wrote:
> Is there something in Lazarus/Fpc I can use to create such a glue program?

i suppose there is but why reinvent the wheel? we, in the old school BBS world, 
have had these things for years... consider writing a BBS or a game for a BBS... 
the fidonet guys developed for different platforms... those platforms had 
different serial hardware and comms methods... think DEC, PDP, Apple //c, 
commodore, IBM PCes and clones... the fidonet guys came up with the FOSSIL 
standard... the FOSSIL driver sits between the serial port and the software... 
this way the BBS and game writers can worry about their software and not get 
bogged down with having to learn serial comms for numerous platforms... there's 
a FOSSIL for this hardware and a FOSSIL for that hardware but the software 
doesn't care about the hardware as it only talks to the FOSSIL driver and the 
(what is now known as an) API is the same on the software side of the fence... 
what the FOSSIL driver talks to on the other side can be anything... it could be 
serial hardware, parallel hardware, TCP port or even something like wrapping the 
data within a telnet connection...

so FOSSIL... when OS/2 Warp Connect came out, there was a FOSSIL developed 
specifically to allow BBSes to ride on virtual serial ports... those virtual 
serial ports were one end of a telnet tunnel... now we had telnet capable BBSes 
using traditional BBS software like Maximus, Remote Access, QuickBBS and others 
that spoke FOSSIL... winwhatever came on stronger and many sysops went to 
winwhatever... it took a long time for any good virtual modem stuffs to come 
out... at least one developer for the winwhatever platform went a step further 
than others and has a network-to-virtual-serial-port driver known as 
NETSERIAL... this allows software that doesn't speak FOSSIL to ride on a virtual 
serial port... i don't remember if NETSERIAL is just a virtual serial port or if 
it also emulates a modem... he also has NETFOSS for a FOSSIL version...

i think NETSERIAL may be what you are after if you are running on a winwhatever 
NT-derived platform...


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