Alternative to Cloanto Amiga Explorer?

[bbond007]

Howdy!

I was looking for a way to load files onto my Minimig without removing the SD card and using UAE to write files to HDF files.

I ended up getting this little Bluetooth to Serial adapter.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812191154

Anyway, I finally got the adapter configured. What a mission, I needed windows PC with a serial port to configure this thing, so I dug this serial/parallel to USB converter thing out of my private stash of old junk.

That converter thing had no signed drivers for windows, but I finally got that gizmo working (by booting with driver signatures disabled) and was able to configure the Bluetooth gizmo.

Finally I got the Minimig "talking" to the PC at 19200,8,N,1 with CTS/RTS handshaking. I may try and go faster later, but its working for now:

I have NCOMM on the Minimig and Termite on the PC. I can type in one and see the results on the other, so I know the serial connection is now working.

So, now, time to try out Amiga Explorer, right? Amiga Explorer only lets me pick COM ports less that 10 and and the bluetooth comport shows up as COM40 and there does not seem to be any way to change it.

The irritating thing is that in the windows Device Manager I can change the port setting of the USB->RS232 adapter but not the Bluetooth COM

I thought I'd be clever and change the Amiga Explorer port setting in the registry:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Cloanto\Amiga Explorer\2010.0\Connection

No dice

So I'm looking for an alternative to Amiga Explorer that does about the same thing but will support COM40.

EDIT:

I'm trying this now
http://www.fabulatech.com/serial-port-mapper.html


Thanks.

[bbond007]

I never could get Amiga explorer to work with my bluetooth serial adapter. I tried EVERYTHING and gave up.

I could not even find a decent terminal program that supported COM40 and zmodem.  Hyperterminal was about the best and its no longer included with Windows and apparently they are really proud of that program as they are asking $80 USD. I can't pay $80 for something that has a GUI that looks like it was designed for Windows 3.1.

Anyway, I have decided to create my own application. Right now the client end on the Amiga uses NCOMM (or any other terminal program that supports zmodem), but maybe in the future I could create a GUI based front end. I do know c but I don't know any of the Amiga's graphical toolkits, so that is a little ways off. I would hate to end up writing something that takes up more resources than just running NCOMM

I'm using the zmodem EXEs from the cygwin project, but cygwin is not required, just .NET.

From the PC (Windows) side you can drag and drop files to send, or from the Minimig end you can navigate around the PS file system and send or receive files. In fact, I used the application to send the NCOMM screen shots to my PC.

I'm currently working on a feature where you can "DIAL" BBS that are on the internet.

This application should work on other computers where your only available means of communications is the serial port. I have included some screen shots of my work in progress.

nate

[freqmax]

Minimig should have Ethernet

Alternative, an Ethernet-RS232 adapter used with some hardware development.