[booboo]

There isn't one is there?

And I don't want to sacrifice the Internal Modem . . .

[Detrius]

Serial technologies:

S-ATA
Firewire
USB
Apple's Old-School Serial Port
9 pin serial port
25 pin serial port

I'm assuming you are referring to Apple's Old-School Serial Ports. What could you possibly want to hook up to a G5 that requires a PCI card? If it's a laser printer, you need a localtalk-ethernet bridge.

[galarneau]

I was thinking about this as well the other day.

I've been messing around with *BSD and read that you can do headless installs by piping the output through the serial port instead of using a monitor. It's not a big deal for a PC where monitors are a dime a dozen, but for an old Sparc box that use funky monitors, it would be really handy to have a serial port.

Also, I was thinking of getting one of those Garmin Frontrunners for training, and it uses a serial port for sync'ing. If I had a serial port, I might be able to figure out the protocol and write some Cocoa software for it.

I see that Keyspan makes a PCI card with 4 Mac-type serial ports on it, so I wonder if a generic PC-type PCI card would work. You know it has to be like 10x cheaper than the Mac version.

[az_matt]

Why bother with a PCI card? There are plenty of USB to serial port adapters available, just google it. All kinds of different port formats supported.

Matthew

[booboo]

One reason to want a serial card is to use a (legacy) MIDI interface.

USB got itself a pretty poor reputation for MIDI devices - sloppy timing, etc. USB to serial port adaptors don't cut it for this application - they're like a worst of both worlds scenario