tsvisser: I'm the author of Pantel's serial integration document. You are mistaken about the CR/LF. No carriage return or linefeed is required after any of the control commands. The protocol is binary, not ASCII.

As for the serial pinouts, they are... what they are. :) The pins are simply reversed on that unit. A simple adapter can be made by crimping two IDC DE-9 connectors onto a piece of ribbon cable -- one forwards, one backwards.

Most of the time, when someone is having trouble controlling the displays, if their serial cable is wired right and the baud rate is set correctly, the problem is that they're not putting the hex (binary) codes into their control system correctly. As explained in the manual, some systems want hex represented as, for example, 0xEA, while others are looking for \EA (that's a backslash, not a forward slash), and still others \xEA, and a few will take, simply, EA. I don't recall what RTI expects (\xEA, I think), but that's probably The_Chad_AA's problem.

Note that some systems allows have a separate way to input hex codes vs. ASCII codes; those usually just want straight hex separated by spaces. For example, power off would be "EA 05 27 01 17". I think the MSC-400 works like this.

Systems that only allow you to enter a string generally use one of the forms with a backslash or simply don't support hex codes. The backslash format is an "escape code". It means, "instead of the next character, send the binary code represented here". That's why you don't want spaces. So you'd want something like "\xEA\x05\x27\x01\x17".

This is a really terse explanation, I know. Let me know if I should explain this better and more slowly.