im having trouble getting expected information from a serial port.

the information arrives as expected through hyper terminal, but in my application its just garbled nonsense.

my application will receive information fine from another pc via a host hyper terminal, but the problem i am having is with some customised hardware which outputs information over a serial connection.

is there a way to determine what encoding etc i need to get the expected output from this hardware in my application, or can i setup my application to behave in the exact same fashion as hyper terminal, seeing as i know that works.