Hi, I need a USB to serial adapter on the Windows side of things, which I plug into one of the laptop's USB ports. To VmWare, that appears as something like COM5. I can create a virtual serial port in the VM by editing its hardware configuration before starting it, and telling it, in this case, to use COM5 and connect the virtual serial port to the physical one. For power, I set the Dectalk USB to RS232 mode, and hook up its USB cable to another uSB port on this laptop. The thing normally has batteries, but 9-volt ones are rare and anyway, this is alright and works. Just start the virtual machine and tell Speakup as usual to find a dectalk express on what it thinks of as COM1, or speakup_ser=0 Hope this helps. This is how I get around the lack of serial ports on this thing. Best, Zack. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Nick Stockton" <nstockton@xxxxxxxxx> To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup at braille.uwo.ca> Sent: Wednesday, March 05, 2008 5:12 AM Subject: Re: Enjoying Slackware 12 in VmWare > How are you able to emulate a serial port and pass the synth commands > through to the dectalk USB? > It sounds really cool I didn't know vmware could do that. > --