I've been wanting to get some DOS games running (without emulation) on an i5 workstation. Is there a way to have one of the many parallel port OPL devices recognized in DOS while connected through USB?
thanks in advance guys!
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Factors...
does motherboard support legacy mode USB?
does anything else USB work in DOS?
is the USB adapter a full parallel port and not just a printer adapter?
do you care if you have to work in a fullscreen DOS prompt under Win98SE?
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To add to that, there are full LPT port cards available. Doubt there are any DOS drivers for any of those cards.
USB is most likely going to have latency issues which will usually show up in time sensitive stuff such as audio hardware so even if you did get it working through USB, it may not even sound correct.
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BitWrangler wrote on 2021-09-27, 16:21:Factors... […]
Factors...
does motherboard support legacy mode USB?
does anything else USB work in DOS?
is the USB adapter a full parallel port and not just a printer adapter?
do you care if you have to work in a fullscreen DOS prompt under Win98SE?
I've only seen USB mass storage drivers for DOS. I know there is a serial USB driver floating around, but it's got some not insignificant licensing fees involved.
I thought legacy mode will present the USB port as a serial PS/2 port?
Trying to avoid running any version of windows entirely, although I wouldn't be opposed to win98SE command.com
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That was less a hypothetical question about the USB abilities of DOS than a question about whether the particular system you intend to use has actually used any other USB hardware in DOS to confirm that that particular system has any chance of using any USB hardware under DOS.
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The problem with pretty much all USB Centronics (LPT) adapters that you can find on-line is that they only support higher-level printer communications.
For a non-printer device such as an OPLxLPT, a Covox Speech Thing or a CNC interface to work, the parallel port interface must support bit banging, which basically means that it should be able to rapidly switch the bits on and off at each of the I/O pins, with accurate timing.
Although USB 2.x and 3.x should be able to offer the required low latency for this (when operating in the right mode), no such fully-featured USB parallel port adapters currently exist in the wild, as far as I know.
A direct USB OPLx solution like the one matze79 linked to above would therefore be more practical, I think.
(But it would still be cool if someone finally developed a fully-featured USB parallel port adapter that wouldn't just work with printers.)
In theory those USB port expanders should support full function of the parallel ports (and serial ports) thereon.
edit: Hmmm google is being "helpful" when you look for usb port expander and telling you that you mean a hub, no google, I didn't I mean one of these https://www.serialgear.com/product/USBG-620U1
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matze79 wrote on 2021-10-01, 09:23:
I've seen this, but I thought this would not work from pure DOS? (maybe I'm wrong)
I have no clue what I'm doing! If you want to watch me fumble through all my retro projects, you can watch here: https://www.youtube.com/user/MrDavejustdave
Yeah, it does not work with DOS.
It would work with DOsbox + Passtrough to it.
Did you open up your PC Case und looked for LPT Header ?
Some 1155/1156 + Boards have still LPT as Header.
Specially Workstations often have such Things.
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https://www.retroianer.de - german retro computer board
