ttl signals vs. sending receiving serial data (case 15992)

[atran]

Hello,

I am currently trying to create an experiment in which media lab sends triggers to a third party program (Testbench- a program used for Emotiv EEG headsets) that receives data from a virtual serial port (Eltima) at different instances in the experiment. I just wanted to better understand the difference between ttl signals and using the comport.txt file to send triggers. In the past, our lab here at York University has used the comport.txt method, however looking at previous files they truncated the lines such that the file looks like this:

comPort, baudRate, parity, dataBit, stopBit
4,19200,n,8,1
input code (1-255), response value (1-12)
0,0

whereas in the manual example, there are several other numbers following the third line. Is there a simple way to explain how this works so I might edit the comport.txt file to best fit my needs? If not, can I use ttl signals instead? How does that parameter work? Your help, as always, is very much appreciated!

Thanks
Alex