On Fri, Nov 30, 2012 at 5:01 AM, Alan Jacobs <alan.jac...@att.net> wrote:
>
> Hello: I am Alan Jacobs in Green Bay Wisconsin USA ( north of Chicago). I
> have a difficult emulation question regarding interrupt driven bidirectional
> parallel port communication on a Celeron 220 Intel processor with 2GB RAM (
> but no hardware KVM extension I can find ), but with bios option to boot
> from USB. The host OS would be Ubuntu 10.10 and the guest would be Windows
> 2K or Win XP Home edition.
>
> The background: I am working with a 12 year old unique marine phased array
> sonar. The manufacturer is out of business. Their gate array driven
> ultrasonic unit communicates with a Windows 2K or Win XP Home PC via IRQ7 on
> parallel port 0x378. The PC only provides a GUI data display like a "radar"
> and setup control of the ultrasonic unit ; the ultrasonic unit does the fast
> microsecond work. Due to the "slamming" environment of boats crashing
> through waves we cannot use a standard hard disk drive- the heads crash and
> scratch the media. We are forced to use solid state flash disks or USB flash
> drives for mass storage of the operating system. Bill Gates made it next to
> impossible to install full Windows ( not BartPE or the like ) on a USB thumb
> drive ( removable media bit problems in the thumb drive controller ).
> Further complicating things is that the manufacturer used early WinRT to to
> write the parallel port control......a popular way to easily develop real
> time parallel port instrumentation....BUT WinRT.sys calls a low level ring 0
> driver called "wrtdev0.VxD". We tried Wine but it doesn't support VxD
> drivers. We tried Oracle Virtualbox....doesn't recognize the port either. We
> can't install Windows on a thumb drive...doesn't install. Soooooo.....we are
> hoping Qemu or some other Linux emulator MAY??? be able to grab the parport.
>
> The Problem: Does Qemu support "wrtdev0.Vxd" interrupt IRQ bidirectional
> parallel port communication for Win2K or WinXP. HELP !!!!
> Much Appreciated & Cheers.
The parallel port emulation (hw/parallel.c) should support
bidirectional communication. The 'parport' back end (qemu-char.c) can
also talk to a real parallel device for Linux and a few other hosts
and it looks like it can read and write data using PP{R,W}DATA ioctls.
Please enable DEBUG_PARALLEL in hw/parallel.c to check if the problem
is in the device emulation side or back end, or simply that the guest
does not use correct port.
>
> Alan Jacobs, a frustrated old engineer
> Green Bay Wisconsin
> alan.jac...@att.net
> ph: 920-654-4477
>
> p.s. I would be HAPPY to find a qualified consultant/ programmer to retain
> to help us solve this dilemma
>
>
>
>
>
