Parallel Port Access from Windows XP? userport.zip is the answer

On Fri, 31 Dec 2004 05:44:57 -0800, mike
wrote:

Paul Burke wrote:
mike wrote:

What's needed is a hack for XP that lets the OS ignore direct
reads/writes to the parallel port. If hackers can disable
registration codes, they ought to be able to figure out how to make XP
ignore direct port accesses. It might be as simple as hacking an
older version of Command.com to run as the dos box in XP. I haven't
tried setenv
yet, but that would be too easy.


Quite a few around, some commercial, some free. GIVEIO is a thingy you
get with a lot of ports of Linux programs to Windumb. TOTALIO is its big
brother, that defeats all the IO protection, not just the printer ports.
TVICHW is a shareware/ commercial program that you can set up for PCI
card address resolution as well. I use AGENTCD that does the same thing,
but is commercial and now only available (if at all) as part of Numega's
DriverWorks suite.

Paul Burke

There seems to be a lot of confusion over this issue. I've been
searching for a solution since it became clear that I'd have to switch
to XP eventually.

#1 response has been, "can't be done! (and you're an idiot for asking)"
Distant second has been, "portio, giveio, winio, directnt, tvicport..."
and they're not cheap.

Userport.zip has been around, buried in the zillion Google hits, but
it's not been obvious that it is
any different from the others. IT IS!!!

It appears that programs like GIVEIO allow you to write a program that
loads and calls a driver or whatever to give you port access. That's
fine as far as it goes. I expect it provides protection to prevent
stomping on other parts of the OS.
But it does nothing to help when you have a hardware device connected to
the parallel port and have ONLY compiled control programs for the device
that expect unrestricted dos-mode access.

userport.zip appears to solve all this by poking a hole in the windowsXP
port access prohibition. You just run it once and it FIXES XP. You
don't need any more drivers or dlls or ocxs, no nothin'. You just write
code and it works.

I've been playing with it for a day. So far, it's run every old dos
program I've thrown at it in a dosbox. Accesses the parallel port
without a hitch. And NO MODIFICATION to the existing DOS code.

OUT &H378, 220 works just like it should in QuickBasic.

I expect it doesn't play nice with the printer driver. You wouldn't
want to use it in a commercial product or put
it on someone else's machine, but it's goin' on all mine.
It makes my stuff work.
I LIKE IT A LOT!!!
MIKE

I've got a parallel port printer and a parallel port scanner on
my XP machine and they don't seem to be impacted by userport (but
I don't print/scan while reading/writing to the port or doing bit
banging). Older parallel port programs that need precise timing
based on the cpu speed, like the CIR IR gizmo, still don't work
on XP.