Hi...

New here to DOSBox, but not to PC's, networking or interfacing, not interested in gaming, except for the odd diversion with Lemmings perhaps, or MaJong, if Im not feeling violent!.

I was pointed at DOSBox by a friend who has been experimenting with it under Linux.

So... I've been looking at this, to get some old instrumentation and management software working again.

Though my programs run in a Windows CMD window (in XP or 2k), they cannot communicate with the outside world in that case. Serial, or parallel ports.

I have to say, that the basic DOS emulation in DOSBox is very good indeed, it's only when trying to get to the outside world that things "become interesting".

After a lot of "faffing" about, frustration etc with DOSBox, I may have found an answer to realiably using any avalable serial ports.

The problem seems to be, that on many modern PC's, even things like built in modems "emulate" the com port in software, in much the same way a USB<>RS232 device does.

As a result, DOSBox seems to have "some dificulty" using these directly, to say the least. But, there may be an answer, in the use of another free utility. (I've yet to try DOSBox on a NT based machine, that has "real" serial ports.)

Anyway, I've found that the free "Eterlogic VSPE" toolkit...
http://www.eterlogic.com/Products.VSPE.html
is a great help in this respect.

I know there are others, even the com0com open source tools, but the Eterlogic program, is just so nice and easy to use, the support is good, and the price is right!

It can make any serial port available over a TCP connection, so when in DOSBox you type 'serial1 nullmodem server:127.0.0.1 port:5555' for example, that will connect just fine with the Eterlogic VSPE port server on your machine, giving you prety good high speed access to the com port.

And you can create any number of these things, with TCP port numbers of your choice, and the configuration is savable, so they all come back in one hit later when you need...

BUT! Any software that uses the handshake lines could still have trouble.

VSPE is good for all sorts of things with serial ports. It can even connect happily with many of the true hardware Ethernet<>RS232 devices, as well as incarnations of itself on other machines (on your LAN, or the other side of the planet, if you have a VPN setup.) Or make a device on one port "Shareable" between many app's (a GPS receiver for example)

Anyway, now all I need to figure out, is why my old Quick Basic programs cant use DOSBox's com port emulation regardless of what the true connection is. Where as many other DOS programs I have, are more than happy with it. I suspect it's got a lot to do with the presence (or lack of?) the handshake line emulation. QB is quit fussy about that sort of thing.
It'd be good if DOSBox's com port emulation, could "fake" the handshake lines to look good all the time, or set to a user selectable pattern.

As to parallel ports, (LPT etc.) Have the authors of DOSBox looked at the Windows DLL "inpout32.dll"?
http://logix4u.net/Legacy_Ports/Parallel_Port … 2000/NT/XP.html

That install's a kenel mode driver, that gives you good near realtime I/O to things like the old LPT port, for general purpose I/O etc, with no BSOD's...
Works fine with Win9x upwards. I've extensively used it to control arbitary devices on the LPT port with 2k and XP, it works fine. Maybe it could be used by DOSBox's emulator, to get to what is needed at times?

I do not know what it's equivelent would be in the 'nix world, but I guess that there is something somewhere...

My next task, is to figure out how to get DOSBox's IPX networking up and running, so a related distributed database app can work properly, not creating multiple records with the same ID!

Cheers All.

And thanks to the creator for DOSBox of course.