recreating grub legacy feature in new grub

[Rance Hall]

I have been putting off for sometime a distro change for one of my
firewall servers.  It ran Centos 5.  The need for security updates and
a change in planned network environment prompted me to go ahead and
drop support for Centos.  I elected to go with Ubuntu 11.10 for the
server and rebuilt it last night after a lot of practice in a VM.

The New OS is in service and everything is running fine.

Here is my issue/problem.  The box is only MOSTLY headless.  The BIOS
on this box does not support output to a serial port. So on occasion I
have to plug in a monitor and keyboard and do bios updates and the
like.

My Centos grub legacy configuration included the terminal --timeout directive.

This allowed me to select which console I was using.

The new grub in Ubuntu can do console, or serial console, but
apparently not BOTH.

Does new grub have a terminal --timeout equivalent?

If so, how do I do it?

Rance