3/22/2021 0 Comments Inpout32 Driver
Parallel ports persisted for quite a while on new motherboards to allow support for legacy printers but are harder to find on new product today.I installed it and tried the blinking example.No success. The program seems to work( I inserted a print(Blink); after every delay and it displays the message), but the LED doesnt light up.As I searched I found out that newer versions of Windows severely limit program access to hardware.
Well, I found out about inpout32.dll, and downloaded it from this page (Binaries only - x86 x64 DLLs and libs). Where do I have to put the inpout32.dll, inpout32.h and inpout32.lib files and how do I link them. You may be able to find this from bios-like settings before boot, or perhaps from the device manager under windows. Inpout32 Portable And FutureFor a more portable and future-proof solution, consider a USB IO chip or microcontroller - but beware the USB latency. I cant find anywhere a reference for what functions I have to use to set the outputs to HIGH or LOW. I am aware of microcontrollers, but future-proof doesnt interest me for the moment. Inpout32 Code To BeMicrosoft took away the ability for normal user code to be able to directly access the hardware registers. Instead they virtualized the accesses and if you try to do they they normally appear to have executed but they do not end up touching the hardware. To get access some special device driver solutions were devised, InpOut32.DLL is one example, that let user code indirectly access the port because the driver runs in system mode. I have previously used InpOut32 for some experiments and found that it adds quite a bit of latency to the accesses such that even on rather high speed machines the fastest available toggle rate of parallel port pins was on the order of less than 22KHz. When I used it I was coding in an unmanaged coding environment. I have not attempted it in my current 64-bit environment because it is just not worth the effort to try to eek it into functionality because there is an additional loss of performance when calling an unmanaged driver from managed user code. Ones time is much more well spent using one of the multitude of USB choices available to get access to external IO via a USB bridge IO device. This little board shows up on the PC as a virtual Comm port and is able to accept very simple text commands that will toggle the outputs on and off or monitor the inputs. I have even found a Python solution, but, as above, no success. Searching for this(they dont provide a link) turned out a single site that gives a download. Tried installing it and it says it fails( its probably for 32 bit (--). How the heck does an old printer work if all of this is so restricted If it doesnt, why did they put a parallel port on the motherboard in 2007. As such they are allowed access to the parallel port hardware if it is found present.
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