Recently I had to play with serial RS232 connections in order to control a robot we have here in the Robotics course at the ULPGC.

We have some pretty old (1989!!!) applications to control and configure the robots which used to run under DOS. I tried to run them under dosemu: unfortunately it didn't work. Maybe because the code the applications use is not really good (direct access to the hardware, incorrect driver usage etc..).

However I can confirm that serial communication in dosemu works.

You just have to correctly configure it: edit your ~/.dosemurc file and add a line to point the COMM1 port to the device file which represents your serial port under linux.

As an example: I use a pl2303 USB-to-serial converter which is represented under Linux as /dev/ttyUSB1. Then my .dosemurc file has this line:

$_com1 = "/dev/ttyUSB1"

To test that everything works as expected you can start dosemu (always check the log in .dosemu and it's outputs) then use the command:

echo HELLO > com1

If everything is setup correctly the HELLO characters will be sent by dosemu to the serial device connected.

Unfortunately, as I already said, this does not guarantee that your dos application using serial communication will work as it might contains unsupported serial communication procedure which might let everything fails.

Anyway .. you can give it a try.