MiSTer FPGA Forum

Hi Guys,

I just assembled Mister FPGA hardware and successfully installed Windows98 over it. Now I wanted to also have parallel port that can work at up to 8MHz just like we used to have LPT interfaces back in days, so came across this project

https://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~heha/b ... dex.en.htm

I am interested in building the v1.7 hardware and using the virtualized port access to access LPT port, My idea is that I want to teach IO access in x86 systems using QBasic so that all device driver related complexities of Windows NT is not anything the beginner level folks would get confused and also get them to understand the architecture of those old PC's. This is just for educational and let the new folks do like I used to create small hardware drivers and at same time write interactive software to interact with hardware.

I think this EZ-USB CY7C68013A-56LFXC based solution can also be configured to work with game port to provide very low latency access ( i am not sure as i haven't built LLAPI project that many must have already built on this forum).

I was also wondering if in Mister it is possible to use I2C or SPI interface to provide IO access for 80486 core?

If Mister could provide limited access through serial interface to map parallel 8 or 16 bit ports it would be wonderful.

Ok so after multiple attempts i came to conclusion that this usb2lpt wont work under mister as mister is not integrating the USB hub as a USB device inside windows 98 and Mister is emulating keyboard and mouse using generic USB device and sending signals similar to 8048 keyboard or PS2 interface to 486 core.

I mounted the same vhd under windows 10 pc vbox and win98 recognized the hardware as well as loaded the device driver properly for usb2lpt. I havent tried sending signals to lpt port so am not sure if it is fully functional.

Is there an alternative for parallel port over mister such as building something similar to SNAC for LPT port?

I am very much familiar with device driver development for win98 and something similar to usb2lpt would be do able if we have some way to send packets from 486 to usb using similar hardware to snac.