PI>        Having just finished a project with the 16550, I can tell you it
PI>is very easy to use and initialize...  I would suggest checking out
PI>National Semiconductor's web site (www.natsemi.com) where they have .PDF
PI>documents on line with the complete 16550 manual being one of them
PI>(you'll need to do a search on 16550 to find it).  The only thing I found
PI>annoying about the 16550 was the Intel-ish practice of requiring the R*
PI>and W* lines to only be active when CS* is.

1> Is it possible to feed a sequence burst of init/config bytes to the 16550,
say from a PC parallel port buffered into the UART so that it could be a
standalone UART without CPU supervision?

2>Can the RX & TX sections be linked together as a standalone serial data time
shifter
( 8Kbps serial data in->Parallel FIFO Buffer->57.6 Kbps serial data out
)?

Many DANDY Answers received from around the World...Keep 'em coming!

TIA, John
sirejohn@bbs-la.com