Alarm Siren wrote:
If you wanted to use or provide the full PC-style interface, to what pins would you need to connect DSR, DTR, RI and DCD?
There is no such a thing as a "PC-style interface." TIA-232 (assuming that is what you meant) existed long before the first microcomputers were developed. All that PC hardware did was introduce the DE-9 connector (on the PC-AT) as an alternate to the standard DB-25 connector. The use of the DE-9 alternate is defined by the TIA-574 standard.
In the TIA-232 standard, there are "data terminal equipment" (DTE) devices and "data communications equipment" (DCE) devices. A terminal, printer, magnetic strip reader or machine controller is a DTE. A computer is a DTE when acting as a workstation.
A DCE is almost always a modem, or a device that links up two DTEs, such as a "null modem" cable. A computer acting as a server is technically a DCE if its serial port is connected to a DTE.
Both DTEs and DCEs are required to have an RxD (receive data) input and a TxD (transmit data) output. RxD and TxD are all that is needed to establish two-way communications. All other circuits are optional and some, such as RI (ring indicator), are seldom used these days—modems are usually programmed to automatically answer and then tell the host via the DCD connection when carrier has been established.
The 6502 contraptions we build are technically DTEs, so a "full" set of TIA-232 connections would be RxD, TxD, CTS, RTS, DSR and DTR. Hardware flow control would be established with CTS and RTS. There would be no reason to implement DCD or RI unless the 6502 contraption was to be directly connected to a modem. Note that DCD and RI are inputs on a DTE, but are outputs on a DCE. It would be illogical to connect, for example, DCD on your 6502 machine to DCD on a PC's serial port, as both are inputs.
The TIA-232 side of the 28L91 has nothing to do with interfacing a UART of any kind to a 65C02 or 65C816, and I as much make that point in my paper. In fact, the 28L91 could be used to communicate on a
TIA-485 link, which is a totally different animal than TIA-232. Yet the microprocessor interface would be exactly the same as if the UART were linked up to a TIA-232 circuit.