Parport PC Parallel Port Tool

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Parport PC Parallel Port Tool

Project Basics
Project Status
Code Download
Auxillary documents

Project Basics

This project is aimed at simple low hassle manipulating and readout of the PC parallel port pins. It can be used to control or record from random electronics connected to the port.

This project has produced an parport.c utility for doing this.

This project should work on any x86 PC Unix system which suppoert the iopl() system call, to get access to the raw port hardware, but has only been tested on my Slackware 10 and 11 systems.

For more info on this project read the README file. For some questions people have asked or may ask read the FAQ list.

Project Status

For the full details of done/doing/todo of the project best read the Logfile. A short excerpt from it is here:

Done are:

Current (= development, = may be fantastic, may be broken):

Select any register of any port
Read, write and read-modify-write accesses
Correct for inverted data read/writes
Series of accesses, with microsecond waits beween them
Formatting of data from port

Todo are:

Nothing planned

Code Download

Current (= development, = may be fantastic, may be broken):

Installation Guide
entire project: Parport.tar.gz
single files:
- Makefile, control process
- parport.c, C source of the tool
- parport.1, man page for parport.c

Auxillary documents

These are files I made while investigating various aspects of the parport:

Wire an Atari VCS (Atari 2600) compatible DE9 connector joystick to 5 pins of the PC parallel port
Making an short distance DB25 cable for bringing out parallel port from behind computer
Make an 8+5+4-LED testing display for the parallel port, analog to RS232 LED testers, later made also an 3+4-LED RS232 LED tester
Photos of LED both testers, left Parport, right RS232, top and bottom sides

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This page is by Neil Franklin, last modification 2007.10.30