"Isaac M. Bavaresco" writes: > Is there any specific reason that you want doing things "the old fashione= d > way?" A most perceptive question. Here's the deal. As a computer user who happened to be blind, I need some way to occasionally read the BIOS setup screens of a few older PC's. There are some high-end servers that have text-based interfaces from lights off to full operation including BIOS setup. None of mine have this or anything else similar. They are Dell motherboards from around 2000 which support enough resources to still do useful things such as run Linux, process audio, handle email and all but the fastest processing tasks so why throw something away when it still does useful work? These BIOS chips sometimes reset their boot sequence order to a less-than optimal sequence when something happens that I actually have never been able to track down but I believe to be something related to drive errors. Go in to BIOS, reset the boot order to what you want and save makes everything good again for maybe 6 months or a year and then, one day, you want to boot from a CDROM and it doesn't but boots from the hard drive and it's time to yank it back again. It turns out that a number of old PC's that have the DB25 printer port on them will let you hit the PRTSCN key or even the CTRL-PRTSCN key which then echoes every new screen to your printer. I actually have a new device that understands VGA signals and will produce a webcam video version of your VGA screen that is so good that OCR applications can read it most of the time but that doesn't tell me where the active part of the screen is which means that changing what you need to change is hit-and-miss, mostly miss. I am thinking that if I can feed the ASCII text of the screen in to another computer via the kermit utility, I should get a usable BIOS screen reader. This isn't something you have to do every day but when you need it, nothing else will do. Keep in mind that at these times, the computer one is trying to fix has no OS yet. The system is sucking electricity but the only software that is about to run is the BIOS so no Linux, BASIC or DOS commands are going to do any good at all. For those interested, the device I have been using to read VGA output is the Epifan AVIO-HD. This is not an advert for the product but it sure gives me capability I never had before. It takes several different video formats and converts them in to usb video class output just like a webcam. What you do with that video is up to you but so far, I am happy with it. Those fancy servers that have lights-out control capability are actually running a second computer more akin to a Raspberry Pi that is running it's own serial or network interface. I wouldn't hold my breath for that to become a new standard any time soon. Martin McCormick WB5AGZ --=20 http://www.piclist.com/techref/piclist PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist .