>Michael L. VanLoon -- HeadCandy.com wrote:
>> There is no need for a special driver.  The card Just Works as a
>> 16550, and it uses the entire 1024-byte FIFO.  The only thing you're
[...]

>That's a round about way of saying that buying an ESP card is
>pointless, you'd be better off buying a 16550 card, isn't it?

Not at all.  In fact, I found the 1024-byte FIFO to be immensely
useful when running a 115.2kbps PPP connection on a SLOW 386/25 for 6
months.  Without the card, that machine would occasionally drop bytes
even at 38.4k.  With the ESP, simply used as a 16550 with large
FIFO's, I never dropped a single byte, even at 115.2kbps.

>Somebody was working on a real driver for it, and they mentioned it
>here or on comp.os.386bsd.development - you might check the mailing
>list archives.  I recall the last announcment was that it sort of
>worked (might be wrong though).

A real DMA 16-bit driver would certainly be nice, and I'd love to have
one, in the long term.  But, it is not an urgent need because the card
is still quite useful in 16550 mode.

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  Michael L. VanLoon                                 michaelv@HeadCandy.com
       --<  Free your mind and your machine -- NetBSD free un*x  >--
     NetBSD working ports: 386+PC, Mac, Amiga, HP300, Sun3, Sun4, PC532,
                           DEC pmax (MIPS R2k/3k), DEC/AXP (Alpha)
     NetBSD ports in progress: VAX and others...
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