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On Mon, 8 Dec 1997 21:23:40 -0800 (PST), Steve Parker wrote: >On Mon, 8 Dec 1997, Paul Khoury wrote: > >> I think that the 16450 adds buffering or some little feature to the >> 8250, and the 16550 has more improvements, and FIFO. > > The 16450 was a slightly faster version of the 8250. The 16550 added a >16-bit FIFO buffer. Are you sure, or did you mean 16 byte? Because it will also work on 8 bit cards. > >> Also interesting >> is that you can take off the 8250 or 16450 on older I/O cards and replace >> it with a 16550, because they operate exactly the same, but software >> determines whether you can use the advanced features of the 16550 or >> not. > > I've done that with a few IO cards. Unless they are socketed it is >hardly worth it. Well, yea. I use an 8250 for my mouse, and a 16550 for my 9600 bps modem. Too bad I can't use my Home & Away on my server, though. I've desoldered 8250's and 16450's from a few IO boards, >installed sockets and stuck in 16550's. It mattered a lot more about 3-7 >years ago when I mainly had '386 and '486 boxes and IO boards with 16550's >were both expensive and hard to find. > > Having a good desolder station makes it practical. Not having one makes >it fairly difficult. Well, I know how to solder, but I'm not too good at it. > > Nowadays you can also get a 16650 which increases the buffer to >32-bytes. This helps at 230.4Kbps and 460.8Kbps speeds and higher. They >no longer use the same pinout and usually have 2-4 ports worth in one IC. > I don't know about that; NSC says that the pinout is still the same as the 16450 and 8250's. Paul