README
======

This is jpnevulator. What once started as a Jackpot Navigator emulator (hence
the strange name) is now a nice serial sniffer and you can use it to send data
on a serial line too. It's sort of like a very simple terminal emulator, like
picocom. But jpnevulator uses hexadecimal byte values to display and send along
the line. Very handy indeed if you are working a lot with serial protocols.

Please see the INSTALL file on how to build the program. It's so easy, anyone
should be able to do it. Just make sure you have a compiler on your computer.
You are running a Free Operating System aren't you? Of course you are! :-)

If you need any more information on how to use the program, please read the
fine manual. Have fun!

As a last note. I once did read a README file or the like from a program, if
I'm correct it was xdm. The author asked for anyone who used and liked his 
program to send him a postcard from the area where they live in. Of course I
did and besides that liked the idea very much. So as a shameless act of copying
I'm asking from you to do the same. If you like the program I would really
love to hear from you by means of a postcard. You can send it to:

	Freddy Spierenburg
	Meer van Annecy 5
	3446 JT Woerden
	The Netherlands

Thanks in advance and again; have fun using this program!


Thank you
=========

Thanks to Michiel van Dam for some good additional ideas. I also like to thank
Dr. Octagon and Colonel Claypool for inspiring music while coding.

Thanks to Ardor for his question which inspired a new great idea! Shame on me
I did not came up with it myself in the first place. :)

Thanks to Paul Slootman for making it possible this software is part of Debian.

Thanks to Eric Shattow for his idea to use pseudo-terminal devices.

Thanks to Gustavo Conrad for his feature request to monitor the serial port
control lines. Thanks to his question I decided to write the code to enable
it.

Thanks to Duane A. Damiano for his feature request to stop reading after a
provided amount of bytes. Enhanced the request into stopping reading and
writing where appropriate.

Thanks to Jonathan Liu for bringing to my attention that 32 is too small to use
/dev/serial/by-id/... devices.

Thanks to Michael Tautschnig for his bugreport.

Thanks to Colin Foster for his --append patch.

Thanks to David Binderman for his bugreport and patch.

Thanks to Rolf Freitag for his bugreport.

Thanks to Ark444 for his GitHub Pull Request, he was the first! His patch
provided binary output and I rewrote it so both the read and write mode of
the software are able to use the binary format, see --base option.

Thanks to Martin Blumenstingl for adding cross compilation and Android (NDK)
build support.


History
=======

The first version of jpnevulator was written around the summer of 2004, when I
worked as a software engineer for Gaming Support. At the time I was working on
Jackpot Junction, a visual jackpot celebration program. For testing purposes I
needed some jackpot values that would automatically change in time, like our
Jackpot Navigator did when coins would get played on gaming machines. I would
then feed those values by means of a serial cable to the Jackpot Junction
system. The first version of jpnevulator was born! It had like six different
jackpot values it would randomly increase and all those values where sent to
the Jackpot Junction by means of the Cham2 protocol. Here the default message
size of 22 stems from. :-)

Soon I needed a more flexible system in which I could alter bytes in any way I
wanted, because there where more protocols to send. That's when the second
version of the program came into shape, sort of like the --write option is
working nowadays. It would read bytes from stdin or a file and would write them
to a serial interface. I used this version of jpnevulator a lot of times and
was very happy with it.

Then I started working for D.A.R.E!! in the start of 2006. For some serious
debugging of the MIPS Linux kernel serial drivers for the AMD Alchemy AU1100
board I needed something in which I knew exactly what was sent on the serial
line and what was not. I also needed something to read those bytes again. The
--read option was born and worked wonderfully well. Not long after I invented
the --read option I added support for the timing information.

It was around then that I notices that jpnevulator was no longer a jackpot
navigator emulator, but more a serial sniffer. And that it could be useful to
other people. So that's why I released the software as Free Software. Let's
see what happens to it...


Copyright notice
================

Copyright (C) 2006-2020 Freddy Spierenburg

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA  02110-1301  USA

Freddy Spierenburg <freddy@snarl.nl>