16550A's for $10 -- (and note to beta driver users)

[Steve Nuchia]

>From article <202 at twwells.uucp>, by bill at twwells.uucp (T. William Wells):
> I have a question. How might I discover whether I'd benefit from
> having one of those chips? I have a vanilla Zenith 386. I looked on
> the I/O card; the only chip that I thought might be a serial chip has
> the part number NS16450N.

Yup, thats the predecessor.  From the 550's data sheet:

	The NS16550A is an improved version of
	the NS16450 Universal Asynchronous babble...

To *benefit* from it you have to enable the fifo's, which takes
either driver hacking or dropping the right stuff into I/O space
and hoping your software can deal with it.  What I hear is that
the software out there doesn't barf if you go around it and enable
the fifo's, but you get better performance with a driver that
knows about it.

PS: If any of the half dozen folks I've sent pre-release copies
	of my driver to read this, let me know how its going.
-- 
Steve Nuchia	    | [...] but the machine would probably be allowed no mercy.
uunet!nuchat!steve  | In other words then, if a machine is expected to be
(713) 334 6720	    | infallible, it cannot be intelligent.  - Alan Turing, 1947