Support

My adapter is not in the port list

Press ⌘R to re-scan. If it still is not there, check the cable first: a surprising number of USB cables carry power only, and a board on one of those charges happily and never appears. Try another port or a powered hub.

Some adapter chips need the manufacturer's driver before macOS creates a /dev/cu.* device for them. If ls /dev/cu.* in Terminal does not list the adapter either, the problem is below Vardaris, and the chip vendor's driver is the fix.

The text is garbage

Almost always the baud rate. Random punctuation and accented letters mean the two ends disagree on speed; set the rate the device uses in Settings → Serial Port. If the speed is right, check data bits and parity, and then the text encoding in Settings → Data Handling. Switching to the hex view (the Hex button) shows whether the bytes themselves are wrong or only their decoding.

Everything lands on one line, or every line is double-spaced

The device and the terminal disagree about line endings. In Settings → Data Handling, Handle CR as real Carriage Return makes a lone CR return to column zero instead of starting a new line, and Ignore Line Feed Character drops LFs for devices that send CRLF where a CR alone would do.

What I type does not appear, or appears twice

That is local echo. Most devices echo what they receive; some do not. Turn Local Echo on in Settings → Terminal for a device that stays silent, and off for one that echoes, or every character shows up twice.

The board resets the moment I connect

Many boards wire DTR or RTS to their reset line, so asserting it on open restarts them. In Settings → Serial Port → Initial Line States when Port opens, set the relevant one to Off.

Short commands work, long ones arrive mangled

The firmware is probably reading its UART in a polling loop with no buffer behind it, and characters arrive faster than it looks for them. Turn on a character or line delay in Settings → Transmit. A few milliseconds per character is usually enough.

I replugged the adapter and the session did not come back

Check that Automatically reconnect after port loss is on in Settings → Miscellaneous. Vardaris finds an adapter again by its USB serial number. Some inexpensive adapters report none, and for those it can only wait for the same /dev path to return.

BBS art looks broken

Connect with Telnet BBS switched on in the TCP Connection sheet. That negotiates telnet and turns on the 80 × 25 ANSI screen with the IBM PC character set. If the board asks what terminal you have, pick its CP437 or ANSI option rather than UTF-8.

Is there SSH?

No. Vardaris speaks serial, raw TCP and telnet. For SSH, the Terminal app that comes with macOS is the right tool.

Where are mark and space parity?

macOS does not support them in its serial driver interface, and offering an option that silently fell back to no parity would corrupt every frame. So they are not in the list.

Does it send anything anywhere?

No. There is no analytics or crash reporting, and the only connections it makes are the ones you open. The privacy policy has the details.