Re: [NTLK] NewTen / UnixNPI and Infrared support

From: Paul Guyot (pguyot_at_kallisys.net)
Date: Wed Jan 14 2004 - 08:35:15 PST


On Tue, 13 Jan 2004, Steven Frank wrote:

> Apparently, NewTen doesn't work if you tell it to use the cu.infrared
> driver on Macs that have infrared ports. I was wondering if this is an
> inherent limitation of the infrared driver on either side, or if it
> just needs to be a certain baud rate, or what.
>
> Since infrared is basically just another serial interface it seems like
> it should work. Anyone know?

It's not another serial interface. You need to do IrDA with TinyTP and
other protocols I don't recall the name of that are not implemented in
MacOS X (as far as I know). And even if you had these, the Newton doesn't
do MNP compression over IrDA, it does it only over serial and as far as I
know, NewTen is just a shell around UnixNPI which does MNP at the lowest
layer.

The only way to connect via IrDA and therefore bootstrap a Newton is to
use Thomas Tempelmann's DIL Tester on MacOS 9. Actually, some old sample
code of the DCL would do it as well (it's been a while since we didn't
compile any application for MacOS 9). I recall we did work out the
parameters of the IrDA communication toolbox tool with Thomas who even
used a DTS for it. If I recall properly, Laurent worked on that with us as
well.

Anyway, if you get IrDA working, I'd be glad to hear about the details so
I can add the layer to MacOS X. Using OpenTransport is not a solution as
OT on MacOS X is just a compatibility layer for TCP/IP and won't provide
serial, AppleTalk or IrDA unlike MacOS 9.

Paul

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