After an observation had been made that you could use the parallel Zip
drive under DOSemu, Grant R. Guenther patched DOSemu to be able to write
all the read/writes on the I/O ports used by the parallel port to a file.
These patches are now part of the standard DOSemu release, and have been
used to decode a number of other adaptors/devices.
This works because when a program tries to access the parallel port it
generates an exception which is then traped by DOSemu and the instruction is
emulated if access to that port has been enabled in the configuration file.
The problem as far as parallel port scanners are concered is that drivers
only exist for Microsoft Windows 3.1 or later. This makes it difficult
if not impossible to use DOSemu to capture the activity on the parallel
port.
All is not lost however, as Wine now provides exactly the same mechanism,
and several people have reported being able to use their scanners under Wine
if they enable access to the registers of the parallel port in their
wine.conf. All we need is a simple patch to Wine to enable this (stay tuned
for a patch sometime this weekend).
By the way I post this information on Monday of this week.
JAB.
-- Jonathan A. Buzzard Email: jab@hex.prestel.co.uk Northumberland, United Kingdom. Tel: +44(0)1661-832195
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