Serial port question

[Rami Saarinen]

I have this 5 button thingy that could prove to be useful. The problem is
that it does not have any drivers and comes just vith a small diagram of
which button corresponds to which pin. I have never done any direct
programming with any hw ports. 

AFAIK common-c++ does have serial API that could be used to read the pins
of the given port (but I find it a bit confusing). So the questions are: 

Is it possible? 

Is it possible to do in OS independent way (at least Linux and Windows XP
compatible way)? 

Is there any simple example of just how to check the serial pins / do the
basic stuff? 

Thanks again!

--
Rami Saarinen

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