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First post, by joeyc100

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can dosbox allow access to the parallel port (0278h)?

Reply 1 of 10, by olddos25

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I don't think so.

Just another user that likes old OSes and videogames, nothing interesting to see here...
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Reply 2 of 10, by Zup

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Plain dosbox can not do that, but some alternate builds can. I used one of those to run a program that needed a parallel port dongle.

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Reply 4 of 10, by Zup

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Back in time (it was 10 years ago)I used H-A-L megabuild to connect a dongle using a real parallel port.

That build is very old and obsolete, and needs a special driver to access real hardware (I don't know if it works on newer Windows). In this page you can find a list of alternate DOSBox builds, just remember to get one that have parallel port passthrough.

Note that you'll need a "real" parallel port, and I mean a built-in port or a PCI card that have one. USB parallel ports probabley won't work. Also you'll need some kind of special driver, because Windows won't let apps access directly the hardware... read the docs of your build to learn how to make it work.

I have traveled across the universe and through the years to find Her.
Sometimes going all the way is just a start...

I'm selling some stuff!

Reply 6 of 10, by joeyc100

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Well, so much for svn...
I connected a breakout box to the motherboards parallel port on back.
I booted MS-DOS and ran a test program which wrote to the parallel port. The breakout box displayed the data.
I booted win 7 and ran the test program thru DOSBOX SVN, after setting the LPT's and PRN to true on the .conf file.
DOSBOX showed the program, and executed the out command, but no data out of the port.
Any ideas?

Reply 7 of 10, by Zup

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As far as I remember (I did that trick ten years ago), the steps were:
- Installing the device driver to allow Dosbox to access the hardware directly. Note that you'll need to configure it with which ports you want to allow access (you said you need 0x278).
- Configure Dosbox to use a real parallel port. Please read carefully what parallel= options are available because you may have options to disable it, fake it, redirect it to a file or allow the passthrough... so maybe "true" depends on a bunch of options being correctly set.

I have traveled across the universe and through the years to find Her.
Sometimes going all the way is just a start...

I'm selling some stuff!

Reply 8 of 10, by joeyc100

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wengier failed to document the options for the parallel port other than true or false. Do you think that he meant the same options for the serial port are applicable for the parallel port? I will try them.

Reply 10 of 10, by JosSchaars

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You didn’t clarify why your DOS program needs to directly access port 0278h.

If it’s non-gaming, you could try vDos. Mind the required settings in config.txt, something like lpt1 = “lpt1”:. While such hardware port access wasn’t noticed before…

Jos