jfm@uncmed.med.unc.edu (John F. Miller) (12/14/89)
We would like to be able to collect serial port input to a disk file in the background in an IBM PC AT compatible running MSDOS. Does anyone know of a commercial or free program to do this sort of thing? Alternatively, is there some free source code for doing MS-DOS format file i/o from within an interrupt service routine? The exact situation is that we want to use PCs to collect ASCII data from scintillation counters and gas chromatographs over a period of hours without having the data collection monopolize the systems. While data collection would be proceeding in the background, the foreground would be used for word processing, spreadsheets, and such. For various reasons, we do not want to switch from MS-DOS to UNIX or OS/2, and we'd rather not have to use Desqview or Windows to accomplish this. I have a terminal emulator TSR that can collect the serial input, but I've been unable to implement the file i/o from within the interrupt service routine (apparently due to DOS's non-reentrancy -- i.e., I can't call DOS file i/o routines when in an interrupt service routine). Any good ideas out there? John F. Miller Department of Pharmacology, UNC-CH School of Medicine 1026A FLOB (231H) CB#7365, Chapel Hill, NC 27599 Tel: (919) 966-6966