Port Address Translation or Port Access Redirection

Modern parallel port cards for either PCI, PCIexpress, and ExpressCard (via PCIe) have fixed port base addresses above 0x1000, e.g. 0x3008. You cannot set their address to one of the well-known ISA addresses 0x378 or 0x278. (Note the address 0x3BC is not capable for EPP and ECP.)

Some older software cannot use an arbitrary port address, and you run into serious trouble. For example, the well-known avrdude command-line chip programmer.

New inpout32.dll

A new version (since March 2013) of my fork of well-known inpout32.dll has a built-in automatic address translation!

Therefore, applications relying on this library will run with such PCI / PCIexpress cards with no further setup. This also applies to 64 bit versions of Windows, and true 64 bit applications (latter use inpoutx64.dll instead, also contained in ZIP archive).

You can check the current address translation by invoking the following command line: »rundll32 inpout32.dll,Info«. A MessageBox will be shown.

Old-style solution

This program can redirect the port accesses for you, and does it universally for all known cases (DOS Box, Win16, Win32, VxD, other kernel-mode driver) in kernel mode.

The bad news: Currently, this software runs on Windows 3.1 (Enhanced Mode), 3.11, 95, 98, Me, NT 3.51, NT4, 2000. But not on XP and newer. Not on SMP machines. ECP and EPP parallel port extensions are not supported.

This program, written for a completely other purpose, has to be set-up as follows:

Trapping: „586 debug register“ or „386 IOPM Table“
Operation: „OFF“
Speaker: what you want
Load and start driver at startup: ON if you don't want to run this program everytime you need redirection
Main address: Emulation at [LPT1]: Address you want
Modify: Physical address: Address you have (see Device Manager)

It is a 16-bit program, but you won't see that. It's open-source. Look at the nice screenshots below:

Screenshots for right program settings as port address translator

This kind of port access redirection is quite fast, so you can run high-speed parallel port devices like JTAG programmers and oscilloscopes, in opposite to the more amazing USB2LPT device.

Henrik Haftmann, last change: Monday, 25-Mar-2013 17:11:20 CET