Modem support

Unfortunately for me, I have a long and torrid history of writing applications for modems and working with serial ports.
I just noticed Ricks announcement about the serial debugging module he’s made avaliable.
It made me wonder how much interest there would be in fax software for RISC OS, I admit it’s seriously edge – but if there’s even one or two people interested and who would use it, I’d be happy to look at writing some fax software.

Whilst I’m writing a random rant is in order….
The US Robotics modems do not support FAX, they may say they do, but they are complete crud and are worthless pieces of **** and do not support FAX properly to be called FAX modems, the firmware is fundamentally broken and 3Com/USR don’t care.

OK that’s that off my chest ;-)

It made me wonder how much interest there would be in fax software for RISC OS,

Sorry, I’m out.

:-)

Don’t have a modem that works any more, and even if I did, how does one pass fax over VoIP? :-)

The US Robotics modems do not support FAX, they may say they do, but they are complete crud and are worthless pieces of **** and do not support FAX properly to be called FAX modems, the firmware is fundamentally broken and 3Com/USR don’t care.

Care to elaborate? I used ArcFAX many times with my USB Courier modem. Never experienced problems. Talking to other modems, it would even negotiate up (to 9600bps?) instead of being stuck at treacle-speed like when calling standalone fax machines.

I’ve had some back experiences with US Robotics USB modems (Albeit on Windows) whereby they refuse to answer an incomming fax automatically.
I gave up and used a generic brand from Amazon & had no issues.

The USR firmware is highly unreliable, there are multiple features missing from the USR firmware that is mandatory for FAX 2.0. A lot of software fudges around the wonderful firmware that USR puked onto their modems.
i.e. just pretend that the fax went OK even though the remote fax machine said it didn’t, which is really great…
I spent six months debugging this recently and after numerous attempts, gave up bought three other modems that support FAX 1.0 or 2.0 and they worked flawlessly.

Maybe we should ask David Pilling to open-source ArcFax. It always worked flawlessly, be it with old and new ZyXEL modems as well as expensive and cheap USR (Courier, Sportster). And its quality was outstanding – I recently sent a Fax with the software from my DSL router which also manages the phone/fax stuff, and its printer driver seemingly does not know how to represent anything other than simplest black&white. Complete absence of dithering to represent colour or grayscale.

When I was living in France my provider, Free (free.fr) had, as part of the ‘package’, a fax gateway.

One just threw at it a (in my case) PDF file and a number, and it all just happened – no cost, just all part of the service.

I think this is where we’re going generally!

Academic exercise, yes: Practical solution …

John

how does one pass fax over VoIP? :-)

T.38

To develop a fax solution in 2014 looks to me like a complete waste of human effort, which could more usefully be spent doing any of numerous other projects for RISC OS.

Agreed, but we are doing this for fun more than anything else.
If there were more programmers, maybe we would get some useful projects completed ;-)
Yes that is a very handbag answer, when I thought of it, it made me laugh! ohhhh! (holds handbag tightly)

If there were more programmers, maybe we would get some useful projects completed ;-)

You’re a programmer. What I’m suggesting is that there is a good choice of other projects that you could usefully turn your talents to. Fax, in 2014, isn’t one of them.

What I’m suggesting is that there is a good choice of other projects that you could usefully turn your talents to.

You might have missed “Agreed, but we are doing this for fun more than anything else.” — the utility of the end result is only one consideration in the RISC OS equation, unfortunately.

I didn’t miss it; in the course of discussion, I hope to persuade him to put his talents to something of more general utility.

Well to put your mind at ease, I have plenty to work on that is of more general use!