I have a Delphi application that reads/writes to a COM port connected to a large hardware device, so I don’t usually have the hardware available during development. That said, the communication protocol is fairly simple, so I can generally do the development and have someone onsite test it, and it usually works. Occasionally I run into a harder problem, though. To solve this, I’d like to setup a virtual COM port where one side of the COM port is my application and the other side is a very simple COM port debug console (similar to the old modem terminal programs), where ASCII commands my app sends are logged onscreen and I can type in some ASCII command to send back to my application to simulate the hardware device. I’ve been unable to find any tools that provide a virtual/software COM port and a console/terminal to debug with. Does anyone have software suggestions and steps to set something like this up?
The software/virtual COM port and terminal need to support Windows 7 64-bit (or Vista 32 if necessary).
I’m using Advanced Virtual COM Port and I’m quite happy with it. Not free, but works like a charm – even with Win7-x64.