Atari Portfolio users - serial port question ...

[mbbrutman]

I'm reading the technical reference and I see two things that scare me on a supposed PC compatible:

• It says you may only use the serial port through the BIOS functions.
• It does not have an 8259 peripheral interrupt controller chip

So this tells me that most PC software which touches the hardware aggressively is not going to work. And hardware that sets up an interrupt handler to handle incoming bytes is definitely going to be broken, as that software usually assumes an 8259 is onboard.

Are there work-arounds, or does everybody just use only programs coded specifically for the Portfolio's serial port?


Mike