Frequently Asked Questions

The supplied driver installs a Com Port in Windows for each serial interface on the VScom PCI or PCIex card.

Since this port is a Com Port, of couse you can perform any operation as on a Standard Com Port. And especially you can perform any library functions, if the library just uses the VCOMM API of Windows. For example the HyperTerminal supplied with Windows up to XP just uses the VCOMM API, so you can use this software on any Com Port.

Functions requiring direct hardware access are not part of Windows libraries, because the drivers abstract from a particular hardware. So software doing direct hardware access needs to adapt to the given hardware. The serial ports are very similar to Standard hardware for Com1, but differ in some aspects. Most important is address and IRQ, which always differ from Com1/Com2 parameters.

This also applies to parallel ports on the PCI cards. You may want to read these answers also:

"How to change I/O Address and IRQ of your parallel PCI port?"

"Can I change the name of the serial/parallel port?"

"Can I use a ZIP-drive on the LPT-port?"