I spent some time today testing out a couple of RS232 adapters with various bits of Psion software. I wanted to write a quick summary of what works and what doesn’t.

Notes

CH340

Seems to work in most places, but DOSBox and DOSBox Staging are very unreliable with it. It’s very cheap and up until recently was what I recommended, but as I’ve tried to use SDBG for debugging on real hardware, I’ve needed something more reliable.

It’s been an interesting morning. I’ve been digging around in the internals of the Siena SSD drive and made some discoveries.

The Siena SSD drive was released so that the diminutive Siena could still read SSDs. I bought one of these on eBay a week ago because I wanted to answer a question: “How did Psion get the SIBO Serial Protocol to work over RS-232?”

As I’ve got older, I’ve grown to like simplicity. I want to faff around less with the minor details and give myself more time for the fun stuff. This project aimed to remove some faff, although at first it didn’t quite go to plan.

My plan was to make a Honda USB cable, meaning I could connect a 3c or 3mx to a PC without needing two cables and a load of bulk.