Z-80 Homebrew Computer - Interfacing With Windows 2000
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Here is my funky interface:
This is just for fun on a machine I don't care about. Don't be doing this unless you are very careful, and insulate those open wires, OK? Read this site's terms of use
Let me tell you about this. Windows 2000, and NT for that matter, locks down the ports in an extreme fashion. Also, PNP completely screws up well meaning hardware hackers. I had this io card that I figured I could set to a port that was different from my real printer port and get Windows 2000 to use a weird driver from the Windows 2000 DDK. I could not, for the life of me, get Windows to not detect 0x378 as LPT1. I tried to disable PNP, but then I couldn't log on. I got to give credit to MS, though, cuz last known good saved my sorry arse. Anyway, if you look at the card in the picture, the gold fingers are actually the address lines from 0-9, right off of the ISA bus. Now, if you translate from right to left in hex digits, the 78 part of 378 (LPT1 for many of you) consists of pins 3,4,5,6 being high. Well, if you just put an inverter (74LS06) between the PAL and each of the fingers, ha, ha, ha, you convert the parallel port to base 300. Which, happens to work well with the DDK. So any old parallel port card can be converted in this fashion. I also turned the card over and disabled the IRQs. On the same end of the card as the above fingers, if you skip the first six fingers and scratch off the next five traces, you will have disabled the IRQ lines. This is all detailed in: 80x86 IBM PC and Compatible Computers: Assembly Language, Design, and Interfacing Volume I and II by Muhammad Ali Mazidi and Janice Gillispie Mazidi The book simply rocks. :) Anyway, if you hack a parallel port in this fashion, you can then use my homebrew computer programs within Windows 2000. Use an optoisolator circuit to keep from blowing up your PC, OK? And, even then, you probably shouldn't be doing such insane things to your PC, cuz you could very well break something. :) See my Terms of Use.
Here is a port of getdump: gdwin2k.txt I have some nasty hacks of gpdread.c from the DDK. BTW, you can get the DDK from Microsoft at http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/ddk/winddk.mspx.
Here are the programs needed to put prog--1 on the display using perl:
out300.txt
out302.txt
putprog.txt
For details on the getdump and putprog programs, see this article.
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