Hi
I'm stumped too...apparently, VB handles the difference in character formats in MSCOMM and TEXT internally...

Try some combinations with few other characters and note down the output character VB gives. I noticed that the ASCII value for 'k' is 0x006B whereas the ASCII equivalent for '[' is 0x005B...so there's an error of one in the higher nibble of the byte.

If you notice a similar pattern for all other characters, you can simply rectify it by adding 16 to the output value
(mov a, #'k'
add a,#010h
mov sbuf,a)

check out this pdf for help---
http://www.dcs.napier.ac.uk/~bill/pdf/Io_ch26.PDF

kundi