Pretty certain most folks here probably know this, but I found some interesting parts from FTDI stocked at Mouser. As most modern machines don't have RS-232 ports anymore, interfacing via a terminal program to get to many of the 6502 boards (assuming they have serial ports) becomes a challenge. As I use mostly VMs running under OSX, I'm using Win7 Pro 64-bit for all of my 6502 work and assign it a USB port for dedicated communications. I use Putty and assign it the serial port created by the device driver and can connect directly to my small 65C02 board setup and have my serial console. I've been using this device which has worked out well:

http://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/FTD ... DGTzXbc%3d

I also found that FTDI also have some DB9 style devices which go directly in place of a DB9 connector and have a mini-USB connector mounted instead of the usual 9-pins and the interface side is available as either RS-232 voltage levels or 3.3v or 5.0v logic levels and in either gender (male/female DB9). This allows a direct connection to a 6551 device without the traditional RS-232 transceiver setup. Once such part is:

http://www.mouser.com/Search/ProductDet ... 9-USB-D5-M

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Regards, KM
https://github.com/floobydust

I especially like the looks of that first one, as it can have cables going to both computers so it's not built into either one and it's movable. Is there anything it has trouble with? If anyone has tried it with Linux, I'd be interested in their experience too. I'm leaning toward ordering one or two, although it's not urgent.

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http://WilsonMinesCo.com/ lots of 6502 resources
The "second front page" is http://wilsonminesco.com/links.html .
What's an additional VIA among friends, anyhow?

I tried it with Ubuntu 13.04 64-bit in a VM... just connected the FTDI USB-Serial device and the driver automagically loaded showing as /dev/ttyUSB0. On the down side, Putty for Linux has issues and won't work with a serial port, at least not the VCP shown. I installed "screen" and did a "sudo screen /dev/ttyUSB0 19200" <enter> and was able to get to my 6502 board. Not using sudo I get an error not having R/W access to /dev/ttyUSB0. Hope this helps.

_________________
Regards, KM
https://github.com/floobydust

And just for chagrins, I installed their device driver on OSX (Mountain Lion), it shows as /dev/tty.usbserial-FTLKBVL (that's odd). However, screen worked fine without sudo.

_________________
Regards, KM
https://github.com/floobydust

FTDI is always a safe bet on Linux as drivers are built-in and it works out of the box. On Windows there are sometimes issues (e.g. Parallax provide FTDI drivers on their website which they recommend instead of what's in Windows).

As it was late last night, I realized I didn't have ownership of the serial port... logging in as root cured that. From root, run "chmod 666 /dev/ttyUSB0", then log back in as a user and putty finds the port and connects.

_________________
Regards, KM
https://github.com/floobydust

On my system, /dev/ttyUSBx is owned by group 'dialout', so making yourself member of the dialout group also works. By the way, all my boards have a 3 pin TTL UART connector (GND, Rx, Tx), and I use an external USB-Serial device (check ebay for pl2303) with a matching header attached to it.