Xplorer Parallel Comms with DOSBox-X

BIOS, Controllers, Memory Cards, Serial I/O, Parallel I/O, etc.
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danhans42
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Xplorer Parallel Comms with DOSBox-X

Post by danhans42 » March 11th, 2019, 7:16 pm

Hi All,

Not sure if anyone has tried this before, didnt see anything documented anywhere so thought I would give it a go. Anyway, some forked versions of dosbox have parallel port passthru, which works in both Linux and Windows.

I tried with DosBox-X, which is a port that adds loads of extra features to v 0.74. See here

http://dosbox-x.com/
https://github.com/joncampbell123/dosbox-x

I tried this under Linux as that is the OS that I run. My machine is a HP Elite 8200 i7 with a parallel port running Linux Mint 19.1. This works in Windows, but the config file is slightly different.

So for linux..

You basically set up DosBox like you normally would, then edit your dosbox.conf. The section [parallel] should be like the following, if not copy the below :-

Code: Select all

[parallel]
# parallel1: parallel1-3 -- set type of device connected to lpt port.
#            Can be:
#            	reallpt (direct parallel port passthrough),
#            	file (records data to a file or passes it to a device),
#            	printer (virtual dot-matrix printer, see [printer] section)
#            Additional parameters must be in the same line in the form of
#            parameter:value.
#              for reallpt:
#              Windows:
#                realbase (the base address of your real parallel port).
#                  Default: 378
#                ecpbase (base address of the ECP registers, optional).
#              Linux: realport (the parallel port device i.e. /dev/parport0).
#              for file: 
#                dev:<devname> (i.e. dev:lpt1) to forward data to a device,
#                or append:<file> appends data to the specified file.
#                Without the above parameters data is written to files in the capture dir.
#                Additional parameters: timeout:<milliseconds> = how long to wait before
#                closing the file on inactivity (default:500), addFF to add a formfeed when
#                closing, addLF to add a linefeed if the app doesn't, cp:<codepage number>
#                to perform codepage translation, i.e. cp:437
#              for printer:
#                printer still has it's own configuration section above.
# parallel2: see parallel1
# parallel3: see parallel1
#    dongle: Enable dongle
parallel1=reallpt realport:/dev/parport0
parallel2=disabled
parallel3=disabled
dongle=false
The only line you need to add is parallel1=reallpt realport:/dev/parport0. If you have more than one parallel port you may need to change this to parport1 or parport. I just included the rest of the excerpt so you can see the other parameters.

Then, just run some Caetla tools in DOSBox and should work fine. You can add port=p10 to your [autoexec] section if you get sick of adding -p10 to your command line. You can see my screenshot below of it using mcdown fine. I haven't tried an xplorer with xlink or a AR/GR 3.0 but can't see why they wouldn't work.

test.jpeg

My setup now is configured to use the 16bit PsyQ compilers, so now I have a DOSbox development environment. Of course, I can also drop out of DOSBox and use the opensource PSXSDK and Catflap for Linux if needs be.

This is the only way to flash a cart over parallel on a modern machine running linux, unless you make a bootable floppy/CD. There are other solutions such as x-killer on Windows.

Video of my setup below - (its only psxbasic but you get the idea)

[BBvideo=853,480]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3RcB4ulpgE[/BBvideo]
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Last edited by danhans42 on March 12th, 2019, 12:52 am, edited 4 times in total.

danhans42
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Post by danhans42 » March 11th, 2019, 7:25 pm

Just to add,

there are other forked versions of dosbox that support this, I just chose DosBox-X as it seems to be the most actively maintained and works on Linux.

You could also try DosBOX Megabuild or one of the other builds from here :- https://www.dosbox.com/wiki/SVN_Builds

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