Description
Virtual Serial Ports Emulator (VSPE) was developed as a solution to help engineers and software developers to create/debug/test applications that use serial ports.
Unlike regular serial ports, virtual COM ports may have special capabilities: for example, VSPE can create virtual port which be opened by multiple applications.
VSPE can share existing serial port with multiple applications (split/merge data), send serial port traffic over network (TCP or UDP protocol), transform data, create connected virtual ports and so on.
Key features
- Virtual Connector creates virtual COM port which can be opened by two applications to exchange data.
- Virtual Pair creates two connected virtual COM ports.
- Virtual Splitter creates multiple virtual COM ports connected to existing COM port in order to share it with many applications.
- Mapper redirects requests from one COM port to another COM port (useful if you want to redirect traffic from legacy application which cannot be re-configured).
- TcpServer shares COM port over network (listening to local TCP port). Data can be modified/filtered with Transformers.
- TcpClient shares COM port over network (connecting to remote TCP port). Data can be modified/filtered with Transformers.
- Serial Redirector redirects data between two COM ports. Data can be modified/filtered with Transformers.
- UDP Manager shares COM port over network using UDP protocol. Data can be modified/filtered with Transformers.
- Bridge connects two generic data streams (COM port, TcpServer, TcpClient, Named Pipe, File). Data can be modified/filtered with Transformers.
- Transformers can filter/transform live traffic flowing through some of VSPE devices above. For example, you can configure multiple TcpClients to receive only specific data from TcpServer.
- Native x86, x86_64 and arm64 platforms support.
- VSPE service can automatically restore last known VSPE configuration on Windows startup (if enabled in settings).
- Translated to 15 languages.
- No telemetry/usage data collection.
Overview
To avoid any problems with kernel driver signature verifications (manifesting as error 241 due to missing root certificate), please ensure that legacy Windows system has all the latest updates installed.
If you are using Windows operating system which is not officially supported by Microsoft (Windows XP, Vista etc), you can hit issues with loading VSPE kernel driver. In this case you can try to using older release which is compatible to those systems:
VSPE_0.937.4.747
Please note that Windows 7/8 x64 (officially deprecated by Microsoft) currently are not able to verify latest VSPE kernel driver signature. x32 platforms do not have this problem.
We are working to mitigate this but it takes time - as we need to go through different kernel driver re-verification procedure.
As a workaround, you can either disable this verification or use VSPE version which uses legacy-compatible drivers:
VSPE_1.1.5.458
Windows 7 x64
Please note that Windows 7 is officially not supported by Microsoft anymore and it is recommended to use up-to-date version of Windows.
VSPE requires Windows 7 x64 to have Service Pack 1 + all security updates to be installed.
If for some reason you prefer not to install Service Pack 1, you can download old VSPE version below which works on unpatched Windows 7 version:
VSPE_0.937.4.747
Known issues and workarounds
-
Upgrading VSPE fails from 0.xxx to 1.xxx version.
When upgrading from version 0.xxx, VSPE sometimes fails to start the kernel driver on first startup, and VSPE will offer several ways to fix this if this happens. The easiest way to avoid this problem is to first uninstall the old version, reboot, and install the new version.
-
Autostart as Windows Service command bug generated by "Helpers -> Set up as Windows Service" (VSPE version: <= 1.1.5.458)
Make sure that the service creation command ends like this (with extra double quotes):
\"" start= auto
and not this (as default):
\" start= auto