Unhide LPT interfaces in BIOS!

My x64 port of InpOut32
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August
New User
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Joined: Sun May 30, 2010 5:43 pm

Unhide LPT interfaces in BIOS!

Post by August »

Hi,
I am just starting to use InpOut32 and have no experience so far with it, but I want to tell you a strange experience with another parallel port driver that we use on some PCs in our company.

We recently got a new PC that has no printer port anymore. We added a PCI LPT card that has been used on other PCs successfully. But on this one: negative! Though the PC got the same Windows XP 32-bit as the other PCs. After some trials I detected that you can activate an LPT interface in the BIOS. Obviously the motherboard has got a parallel port, but no connector, so the port is disabled by default. Activating the port helped: after booting the PCI-based port now showed up as LPT2 and could be used properly! I do not exactly know how this comes, but Windows' method of enumerating the legacy hardware still includes some archaic traits.

Maybe this gives a direction for those which did not get their PCI cards running. Of course, it is definitely not possible to connect a printer port via USB to a driver that attempts to set or reset parallel port bits, as USB only supports printers as such.

Best Regards, and thanks for your work!
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