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First post, by gazmercer

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Hi all,
Never used a forum like this before, hope I am posting in the right section.

I have a few old programs that I am using for legacy products that are no longer supported by the manufacturers. These are a Z80 compiler, an eprom programmer and a PCB board layout program.
I have got two of the programs running fine with the dosbox, but I cannot get the PCB layout program to run.
The problem is that the PCB program is dongle protected on the parallel port. I have followed all the patches that have been done by HAL9000 and searched all over the forum, but I cannot come up with the reason why this particular program will not work.
My eprom programmer is able to access the parallel port and program/read from eproms so I think I must have done some things right.

I am ready to give this up as a bad job if no one can help.

Reply 2 of 8, by gazmercer

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Hal9000, thanks for replying so quickly.

Any idea which pins might provide the power? I cannot find any details of actual power provided by the LPT port. I am measuring 4.46V between pin 1 and pin 25 which I believe is strobe and ground.

I have another dongle by the way, for a C compiler, which is quite happy working from windows on the same port.

Reply 3 of 8, by h-a-l-9000

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There is no real power pin on the parallel port, they have to use data lines.

Have you tried to change the speed of the emulator? Could be some timing issue. There is not much else room for bugs.

1+1=10

Reply 5 of 8, by Dominus

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could it be connected to the setting of the LPT port in the Bios? I just mention it since when I used a C64-Floppy to LPT adapter back in the days the adapter was picky in which mode the LPT port was. The modes are SPP, ECP and/or EPP if I remember correctly (I have disabled my LPT port for quite some time now) and you normaly can set something for the port in the bios.
Again, sorry if I'm totally off track here 😀

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Reply 7 of 8, by gazmercer

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I have tried every possible setting in the Bios, most options do not work with the porttalk program, i.e. port not found, unless it is set to ECP. It is now set to ECP, while I have tried the different speed settings.

Reply 8 of 8, by mf2hd

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@ gazmercer

hello,
some (very,very old) dongle uses a custom TTL chip (74...) that wants the right voltages level as hal wrote.

For other ones there are some delay utlities to run dongle on fast pc and nt o.s. (google "delaynt.zip").

I've a dongle that works only with a kind of reset, all the data port must be
FF before start the protected program.
I've solve it with a mini exe created with a free basic compiler (rapidq).
The program is so simple:

OUT &H378,255

Of course you must change the lpt address if the parallel port on your pc have another one.

May be an other cause: the lpt on the news m.boards not use a dedicate chip (as the old ones) but they are managed by the m.b. chipset.
So, many "specials" devices (scanner, programmers, etc.) connected to lpt not works well.
The only way in this cases is to buy an extra pci or isa (best, if you have the slot) parallel port.

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