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ParaPort is a software system providing a Windows kernel driver following the Microsoft's Windows Driver Model (WDM) to access pin by pin to the parallel port hardware of a personal computer.

Client applications written in C or C++ do not use the driver directly (via "DeviceIoControl( )" from Windows application programming interface "API"), but use a Windows dynamic link library ("ParaPort.Dll") to communicate with this driver. The Dll is accessed from the applications via the API of ParaPort.

Features

• The parallel port is selected by its "friendly name", e.g.: "LPT1", "lpt2".
• The timing model can be customized with a "sleeping" interval.
• Client applications do not need to access the driver directly ( via "::DeviceIoControl( )" ), but uses an easy API of a dynamic link library.
• ParaPortUtility application to control the parallel port.

Supported Platforms

ParaPort has been developed and tested on Windows 2000.

It has been validated "OK" on Windows 98 SE and Windows XP.

Since ParaPort follows Microsoft's Windows Driver Model, it should also work on Windows ME.

ParaPort can not be used on Windows NT4 as it does not support WDM.

ParaPort has not been tried on Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1 nor Windows 10.

Using ParaPort

To use ParaPort in C/C++ applications, the following steps must be done:

• Add the directory "[Program Files]\ParaPort\include" to the include paths of your project/make file
• Make visible the file "ParaPort.dll" to your application. This can be done by:
  • copying the file "ParaPort.dll" into windows system directory ( e.g.: "c:\WinNT\system" )
  • copying the file "ParaPort.dll" into the same directory as your application
  • adding the path "[Program Files]\ParaPort\bin" to the environment variable "path"