Are there any DOS emulators around that offer complete parallel port passthrough support? by complete, I mean support for ECP/EPP too.
I have tried several emulators (Bochs, DOSBox Megabuild, VirtualBox, VMware) but only SPP mode support is offered at best.
I'm trying to recover large amounts of data via old tape drive connected to parallel port, and SPP mode is far too slow.
is a parallel port to usb adapter any good ?
Guardian of the Sacred Five Terabyte's of Gaming Goodness
wrote:is a parallel port to usb adapter any good ?
... Not the usual ones at least, they only provide a USB printer profile.
Also, his problem really isn't a hardware problem per se. But I don't have an answer.
"I see a little silhouette-o of a man, Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you
do the Fandango!" - Queen
Stiletto
What about using:
a) An older computer with hardware parallel port.
b) A less older computer with parallel port PCI card.
Format the computer to boot from MS-DOS and use that computer to retrieve the data. Then, you can use your favourite method (swapping HDD, upload from ethernet, copy to USB, burn in optical media) to copy your data to your modern computers.
I have traveled across the universe and through the years to find Her.
Sometimes going all the way is just a start...
wrote:wrote:is a parallel port to usb adapter any good ?
... Not the usual ones at least, they only provide a USB printer profile.
Just for the record if you get a USB adapter with a Prolific chipset (e.g. PL2305) the hardware can switch to an alternate mode that will let you control the state of each pin individually, as you can with a "real" parallel port. I've not gotten around to trying this out though, so I don't know what sort of driver support there is available for these modes. You'd at least need Prolific's driver as the default USB class driver won't support this mode, but I'm not sure how it appears to the host system when this mode is active, nor how the driver would switch between USB printer mode and real parallel port mode.
@Zup: I'm sure you know that you can also get PCI-e parallel port cards - do you think these would work in real mode DOS?
I'm using a PCI Express Parallel Port add-on card, which lacks MS-DOS drivers. PCI Express cards lack the usual legacy remapping of addresses, so I don't think MS-DOS drivers would even be possible.
It isn't worth building another older system, just to recover this data.
