Hello,

My laptop doesn't have a serial port and I was thinking of using one of these for configurinjg my MSnSE.

http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=29968&criteria=usb%20serial&doy=6m1

Any views on it?

Regards
Steve

Never used one but if Maplins say they work, go for it.
You can always send it back if it does not do what they say it does.

I bought my USB - RS232 adaptor from Maplins, and it works a treat. I use it to communicate with an MS2.

Make sure you buy a straight through serial cable, as a null modem cable (the other flavour available)is crossover wired on the Tx and Rx connections, and thus wont work (if its the same as a MS2, and is suspect heavily that it is).

Good luck. It really isnt too hard to do.

Ed.
P.S. the adaptor i use is based on the ProLific chipset.

Its analogous to network cables, really...

Additional: ping me back if any of that isnt clear, and I'll try to help further...!

Ed.

http://www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/103054

That'll do the job just as well.

Just make sure you get the drivers from the Prolific website www.prolific.com.tw rather than the ones on the CD.

It's a Prolific PL230x chipset in 95% of the cheaper cables. Failing that it'll be a Cygnus (now Silicon Labs) or TI chipset.

Whichever it is, they will all work, the only problems are when people use the drivers on the CD's rather than the website.

The Maplin one will be PL230x the same as the eBuyer one too.

I've literally sold 10,000+ of the eBuyer ones without a single issue, with a very wide variety of hardware.

There used to be a couple of comms settings in the msns-extra.ini file that may need to be altered, not sure about later versions, have a look Here

The following settings worked ok for me:
pageActivationDelay = 50
;USB serial port users may need to increase the following value
writeBlocks = off ; Default is on.
interWriteDelay = 5 ; Becomes "interCommandDelay" if writeBlocks is "on"

I've used a Maplins ZP43 for a while now, but I'm still using Megatune MegaTune2.25b358.

HTH

i used the same as original posting and worked fine for me.