[Simh] Real serial ports

[Mark Pizzolato]

On Thursday, December 15, 2016 at 6:58 PM, David Gesswein wrote:
>    For the PDP-8 it looks like the console port can be set to a real serial
> port. Can the ttix serial ports be attached to real serial ports?

Yes.   Buried amongst the output of:

    sim> HELP TTXI ATTACH

you will find:

    Multiplexer lines may be connected to serial ports on the host system.
    Serial ports may be specified as an operating system specific device names
    or using simh generic serial names.  simh generic names are of the form
    serN, where N is from 0 thru one less than the maximum number of serial
    ports on the local system.  The mapping of simh generic port names to OS
    specific names can be displayed using the following command:

       sim> SHOW SERIAL
       Serial devices:
        ser0   COM1 (\Device\Serial0)
        ser1   COM3 (Winachcf0)

       sim> ATTACH TTIX Line=n,Connect=ser0

    or equivalently:

       sim> ATTACH TTIX Line=n,Connect=COM1

The example port names here are for a windows host, but the 'ser0', 'ser1' names are platform independent and a physical serial port name will work as well on most platforms.  If it doesn't on yours we'll need a way to determine what serial ports exist and that can be added.  You may need privileges or other access rights to manipulate serial ports directly depending on some platform specific issues, but that shouldn't surprise anyone.