Use of serial console with the emulated calculator

[talwat]

Hi!

I've been thinking about this for a long while now and finally decided to ask here on Github. I wanted to see if it was possible to use a serial console instead of a physical serial device, since my end goal is to be able to interface with a real calculator from a computer with the serial port using srldrvce.h.

This might be a misguided question, since admittedly I know very little about the internals of the calculator and the specifics around serial/USB. I asked on the discord server a while ago and was told that this would only be possible with a physical calculator at the moment, so maybe this should be a feature request instead?

In the latest nightly version, there has been an option for a "virtual flash drive," which seems sort of close to what I want to do, but I couldn't find much documentation about the serial functionality.

[talwat]

#362

I think this issue might be related? I'm assuming that if calc->host with USB is not yet functional, then this issue is also dependent on that one to be figured out. The issue was last updated in 2024, so it's also possible that it's just not happening. Though, purely looking at some of the recent commit history, there have been updates to the USB stack so maybe?

[adriweb]

There has indeed been no change in that regard, but maybe one day 🤷‍♂️
But, I'm not sure what would happen if you plug in a calc that's acting as a USB device (not host) running a USB program to talk to another one (running in CEmu as a host), maybe that'd work?

As for #362 it's not actually related, it is about variable transfers to be done using the actual USB protocol rather than extracting stuff from memory (the other way around has been implemented correctly, just not that one).

[talwat]

The goal is to avoid using a physical calculator for development since it's kind of a pain, but I suppose there is really no other way currently. My question now is whether it is technically possible to one day implement behavior like this into CEmu.

srldrvce.h can apparently do both however, so I might try to do what you suggested purely out of curiosity for the current abilities of CEmu.

The srldrvce library adds support for reading and writing serial devices in host mode, as well as emulating a serial device in device mode.