On 16 Nov 98 at 9:23, Mike Morgan wrote:

> I just upgraded from a PS/1 386SX/25 (geez!).
> ....
> ... although I did have to add a DEBUG line (found in the modem
> readme) to the autoexec.bat in order to get the thing to work
> consistently.

  On many 386-era machines, the BIOS would only detect COM1 and COM2
(at their standard addresses) at startup.  If you had additional
ports installed or non-standard addresses, you generally needed
software in AUTOEXEC.BAT to update the RAM "BIOS Data Area" to
reflect that.  At one point there were 20-30 common
shareware/freeware utilities for this -- I might still have a copy of
the one I wrote....
  Most actually looked for and detected the additional/odd ports.  I
can imagine, though, that if your configuration was pretty much fixed
(386SX must be about 7-8 years old, right?), you could get by with a
simple script fed to DEBUG.EXE that would stuff the right values into
the right locations.
  That would be my expectation of what you were seeing, anyway.

David G

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