Dongle support doesn't work \ VOGONS

Dongle support doesn't work

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First post, by dizze

Posted on 2006-02-20, 17:18

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Hello people,
I have been looking in the forums and noticed that directserial should work now. However, somehow I cannot get my serial dongle to work. I use a official program that needs this dongle and I cannot bypass this. The response when I start the program is that no valid hardware key is found.

A service/driver is running which controls the dongle and somehow the program does find it when it runs under the offical dos-shell (windows XP). The driver is from "Rainbow Technologies" and is "alled Sentinel System Driver".

I really hope that someone can help me out with this, cause I really need this program to work in Dosbox. The main reason is that it stops calculating when I minimize the normal dos-cmd shell. I already tried to change the Misc settings of the dos shortcut (background->always suspend), but that does not help.

Reply 1 of 17, by Qbix

Posted on 2006-02-20, 17:20

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did you try a cvs build ?
http://cvscompile.aep-emu.de/dosbox.htm
use that one
then create a new configfile
(inside dosbox type: config -wc dosbox.conf )
and look in the dosbox.conf for the new [serial] section.
It should work much better then the 0.63 version

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Reply 2 of 17, by dizze

Posted on 2006-02-21, 13:49

dizze Offline

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Well Qbix tanx for your advice, but it didn't work. I now know what the problem might be. The dongle uses the paralel port LPT1. Is there a way to use LPT1 from dosbox?

Reply 3 of 17, by Qbix

Posted on 2006-02-21, 14:18

Qbix Offline

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hmm nope.
no lptp support
I assumed you used a serial dongle

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Reply 4 of 17, by dizze

Posted on 2006-02-21, 15:38

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Wil this be supported in the near future?

After reading all kinds of posts I have to conclude that I'm not the only one that would like to see this implemented. Hopefully someone with programming skills reads this shout for help and starts to create a patch. Please let me know if you know about anyone willing to do this...

Reply 5 of 17, by Great Hierophant

Posted on 2006-02-21, 22:59

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Why is there support for direct serial anyways? Emulated serial is necessary for mice and modems, but why the need to interface with real hardware?

Reply 6 of 17, by DosFreak

Posted on 2006-02-22, 02:14

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Old Apps I guess.

Here's the Serial Port thread: DirectSerial patch

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Reply 7 of 17, by Great Hierophant

Posted on 2006-02-22, 04:48

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What game would support hardware beyond a generic, Hayes-compatible modem or serial mouse? These can be emulated in software. Support for a direct gameport would be much more useful (all sorts of cool analog joysticks + two joysticks) and direct parallel (support for LPT DACs and old-style printers.)

Reply 8 of 17, by `Moe`

Posted on 2006-02-22, 09:33

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DOSBox's goal is games: Direct serial is useful (Settlers has second mouse support via serial. A second mouse can't be emulated.), LPT DACs are emulated (uh, one of them, was it Covox?), 2 Joysticks and 4-axis Joysticks are supported (and possibly emulated). There is even a printer patch on SF that emulates old-school dot matrix printers, which I'd love to see in as I have several games that support printing.
But there's no real use for direct LPT access - anything useful for games is better done emulated, and anything not possible to emulate is not a game.

Reply 9 of 17, by eL_PuSHeR

Posted on 2006-02-22, 09:36

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I disagree, but it just a matter on developers. We cannot be asking for everything, I know. Some old ms-dos apps don't work anymore under NTVDM but they do work under DOSBox. 😎

Besides, DOSBox allows a ms-dos application to break the stupid 16MB memory limit NTVDM has.

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Reply 10 of 17, by DosFreak

Posted on 2006-02-22, 09:54

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I think we may eventually see LPT support in DosBox (I'm just guessing) but it of course is not a high priority as compared to other things.

Personally I'd rather see GLIDE support before LPT support even though oddly I probably have more DOS games that print than DOS games that use GLIDE.........

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Reply 11 of 17, by dvwjr

Posted on 2006-02-22, 10:06

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eL_PuSHeR wrote:
Besides, DOSBox allows a ms-dos application to break the stupid 16MB memory limit NTVDM has.

What 16MB memory limit would that be? 😕

dvwjr

Reply 12 of 17, by wd

Posted on 2006-02-22, 10:14

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Well in the file properties of dos executables you can specify
16mb ems/xms/dpmi memory as maximum.

Reply 13 of 17, by Alkarion

Posted on 2006-02-22, 13:00

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We all know Dosbox is mainly for games, but I wouldn't complain if someone implemented direct LPT access. It's not important, and I can't think of a game that would make use of it.

But AFAIK Dosbox is already the first pick for old DOS applications and it wouldn't hurt if its functionality is extended in this respect. LPT access would be nice since I know of no program which enables DOS programs to talk to the LPT port under modern OSs. VMWare and VirtualPC both fail in this respect. (At least when you try to do more than printing)

Reply 14 of 17, by dvwjr

Posted on 2006-02-22, 13:14

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wd wrote:
Well in the file properties of dos executables you can specify
16mb ems/xms/dpmi memory as maximum.

Hmmm...

Here is a picture from my Desktop. No photoshopping was performed on this image! 😳

Works for me... 😁

The actual WinXP (SP2) NTVDM memory limits are 32MB for EMS, 32MB for XMS and DPMI appears to be limited only by WinXP page-file limits.

dvwjr

Reply 15 of 17, by wd

Posted on 2006-02-22, 13:40

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Mine doesn't allow this, happy you 😉
But if you look at the available EMS memory in msd, you know
why the maximum should be 16mb (like the default in dosbox).

Reply 16 of 17, by dvwjr

Posted on 2006-02-22, 20:37

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wd wrote:
But if you look at the available EMS memory in msd, you know
why the maximum should be 16mb (like the default in dosbox).

I believe that is just an artifact of utility displaying the word/sign-bit. Since EMS defines 'pages' as 16 kilo-byte units, the real number the NTVDM deals with is 2048 'pages' of EMS memory, the LIM 4.0 specification limit. The number is real... 😀

dvwjr

Reply 17 of 17, by wd

Posted on 2006-02-22, 20:43

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thinking of 286 protected mode 😉

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