hi! I returned from death.

i been working in other thign's and because is the firs time that i look in 3dgs forums since a year, i look in this thread. I hope you still have interest in that thing's. This weekend i look carefully what you posted and try to answer if i can or at leas colaborate with you.
best regards
Juan

edit#1
here some in advance

1) port_out is for outputing data to a parallel por (serial is other thing)

2) what you mean with "connect pin" if you wish to use the serial port, you have to have a serial device on the other end of the wire (wich is the case of nicholas that uses a microcontroller to play with)
the serial connector is db9 male and the pins used to do a simple tx/rx are 2, 3 and 5. pin 5 is the common or ground, pin 3 is Transmit and pin 2 is receive.

Nicholas
1) probably is for that
2) it's a handle, operating system says that number and we have to use it and just that!
3) i dont rembember exacly what my code does (i look the forum but not my work! sorry)
but, b=LPDCB.BaudRate is for read the baud rate of the device. so if the pannel says 1200, the device is working at 1200 or we have write/read the configuration wrong.
4) DCBLenght is the lenght of the structure and it is fixed. is required for so many calls that the firs integer contains the lenght of the structure and is required to be exactly that always in this case (because a device control block is fixed)