I would beg to differ about the inability of an 8051 type UART to receive and/or transmit at a serial format of 2400/E/7/1. All you have to do is to run the 8051 UART in 8-bit mode such that the parity bit for the serial line is included in the data received or transmitted.

In the case that Sulax has, provided the timer is properly setup for 2400 baud and the UART is set for normal ASYNC 8-bits mode then data received data would end up with the parity bit in the Bit-7 position of each byte received. Upon reading each byte from the SBUF it can be moved to the A register where the parity flag of the PSW can be checked to verify the parity of the data. Then before using the data for its intended purpose simply AND the A register with an 07FH value to clear out the parity bit.

Michael Karas