I did not even notice you could now use a second parameter in Serial.begin to specify the protocol. What version introduced this? The reference pages for Serial.begin in the 1.0.3 download do not refer to the extra protocol parameter but the on-line version does.
I do not have a Mega but after reading this thread and referring to the on-line documentation I can confirm the protocol parameter is working on a v2 UNO using 1.0.3 IDE. Below is the output. CH1 = 8N1, CH2 = 8O1 & CH3 = 8E1
