Dealing with Security Dongle on LPT1

[pradeep1]

Hello,

A friend of ours has a high end plotter and associated software for drawing and cutting plastic stencil for use in an industrial setting. She is running this on an old Packard Bell 486DX machine with like 2MB RAM. Very, very old school. The software has a security feature in that it has a little dongle that attaches to the parrallel port and from there it connects to the plotter/cutter. The software has to access that dongle each time it starts, otherwise it won't work.

She wants to upgrade her system to use a "modern" computer but the company that makes the equipment went out of business a while back ago. The software only supports versions of Windows up to Win98. If she wants to use this machine with a modern computer, she'll have to buy both new software and hardware from another vendor, which is an outlay of a minimum $5,000-10,000.

I told her that she can probably run the software in Windows XP emulation mode, emulating Windows 95 or 98. She tried that, but it still didn't work. The software kept erroring out saying it could not access the dongle, which is connected to the parrallel port. When I had her open up device manager, under the "Ports (COM & LPT)", she doesn't even have an LPT1 showing, instead it shows LPT2 and LPT3. I don't think she has three parrallel ports, but I do know she has one on the back of her modern XP box.

Specs on her new XP computer:

Dell P4, 3.0 GHz Dimension 9100, Dell A01 BIOS, XP Home, 1 GB RAM

Any thoughts on how we an salvage this situation?

- Enable LPT1 on her computer somehow? Maybe there is an option in the BIOS?
- Use an LPT1 to USB converter
- Something wrong in the way the emulation mode is being used?


Thanks,

Pradeep

 

[KGB]

Two things immediately come to mind:

1. Format and install Win98. Downside = Dell warranty goes out the window.

2. Download and install Virtual PC and then install and run Win98 in a virtualized state.

 

[tungtung]

Just a warning ... most new computers can't run Win98, it's driver problem since the later Intel Chipsets are not made to run in Win98 at all. You can try but I'm just giving a heads up here. Also in most cases virtualization just won't help since it also virtualize your parallel port, so it might actually give you more problem that you have now.

By the way how many parallel ports does the machine have? How come it has LPT2 and LPT3. It's kinda strange to have that many parallel ports in new PC.
Most likely it has something to do with incorrect BIOS setting, go to the BIOS and fiddle with the Parallel port setting. They have those EPP/ECP thingy setting, then the IRQ setting and Address mapping whatever. I would just go to the old machine look up in the BIOS what the Parallel port settings are. From my experience all onboard parallel ports are defaulted to LPT1 with IRQ 7 setting. Play around those settings ... or failing that ... just go to the BIOS and set the BIOS to default factory setting, it should give you the standard parallel port setup.

I honestly doubt USB to parallel converter will work. Most of these dongles are using old school assembly codes and what have you, which are very strict and as far as I know they will only work on native parallel ports nothing else (which also why I don't think virtual PC will work). Regarding the XP emulation to Win98, you might probably not need to use it at all, who knows, just try run it as native XP application.

By the way what program is it?
I'd personally try google around see if there are user forum supports for the program.

 

[etech]

Try this.

Check if your LPT1: is disabled in windows.

# Start Device Manager
# Expand Ports (COM & LPT).
# Right-click Printer Port (LPT1), then select Properties.
# Under "Device usage," select enable this device.

For redirection it is usually disabled. For use with a dongle it should be enabled.



Being disabled would explain why you have a LPT2 and 3 and no LPT1

 

[pradeep1]

Originally posted by: etech
Try this.

Check if your LPT1: is disabled in windows.

# Start Device Manager
# Expand Ports (COM & LPT).
# Right-click Printer Port (LPT1), then select Properties.
# Under "Device usage," select enable this device.

For redirection it is usually disabled. For use with a dongle it should be enabled.



Being disabled would explain why you have a LPT2 and 3 and no LPT1

I am remotely diagnosing this problem by phone, and my friend said that he could not see LPT1 under the COM & LPT heading.

 

[pradeep1]

Originally posted by: tungtung
Just a warning ... most new computers can't run Win98, it's driver problem since the later Intel Chipsets are not made to run in Win98 at all. You can try but I'm just giving a heads up here. Also in most cases virtualization just won't help since it also virtualize your parallel port, so it might actually give you more problem that you have now.

By the way how many parallel ports does the machine have? How come it has LPT2 and LPT3. It's kinda strange to have that many parallel ports in new PC.
Most likely it has something to do with incorrect BIOS setting, go to the BIOS and fiddle with the Parallel port setting. They have those EPP/ECP thingy setting, then the IRQ setting and Address mapping whatever. I would just go to the old machine look up in the BIOS what the Parallel port settings are. From my experience all onboard parallel ports are defaulted to LPT1 with IRQ 7 setting. Play around those settings ... or failing that ... just go to the BIOS and set the BIOS to default factory setting, it should give you the standard parallel port setup.

I honestly doubt USB to parallel converter will work. Most of these dongles are using old school assembly codes and what have you, which are very strict and as far as I know they will only work on native parallel ports nothing else (which also why I don't think virtual PC will work). Regarding the XP emulation to Win98, you might probably not need to use it at all, who knows, just try run it as native XP application.

By the way what program is it?
I'd personally try google around see if there are user forum supports for the program.

Thanks for your response. The program is a CAD program made especially for the monument industry. I am not sure of the name, but I'll find out tomorrow.

 

[versitalbear]

I have a similar problem, but my program is an older program that uses a plotter cutter. I have used VMWare virtual player to run a copy of win98se in a virtual machine and the dongle is correctly found and the program works, but all output I have to move to the winxp part then print or plot from there because I cannot get it to do that from VMWare.
I did a ton of research into this problem and finally found that our problem lies in the differences between how 98se and XP accesses the LPT ports. Apparently one of the security fixes Microsoft change to help improve windows security was to redo the way the OS accesses the LPT ports, and VMWare has drivers that will some how make the LPT ports work like they did in 98SE when used in a XP window.
The way I see it is, if VMWare can emulate the LPT port and get them to work like they did in 98SE then there must be a way to also make a driver to do the same for winXP, I have simply not found any driver that successfully drives the LPT port like 98se within winXP.
The security dongles are accessed with machine code that only knows how the LPT ports are used in 98se and earlier OS's and when it tries to do the same in WinXP it simply cannot find the dongle because XP changed how the LPT port is addressed.
So if anyone out here knows of a driver that will drive the LPT port in XP the same way that 98se did, I would be eternally grateful as I guess "pradeep1" will be as well. If such a driver exists please let me know where I can get a copy.
FYI, I found the information on how to patch a program to make a bypass for a dongle but the company of this other program must be out of business, and the program copyright expired, and if the dongle is a Aladdin security dongle, I could let you know the location of the information on how to bypass it so you don't need it plugged in, however, you need the original dongle (to copy your security number out of) then use a text editor to write about 6 lines of simple code, so you can make a patch that fools the program into thinking the dongle is still plugged into the LPT port, HOWEVER you still need to have the access to the LPT port as used by 98se and earlier OS's, or the program patch will still crap out looking for the security number on the dongle as it does now. IMPORTANT, if the program is still under an active copyright (you must check this) it is illegal to modify or patch the program to bypass the dongle being plugged into the computer.

 

[QuietDad]

If you have access to a programmer with Visual Studio, there is a way. In most programming suites, there are debugging programs. Chances are the dongle is checked via a dll installed with the software. Using the debuggers/trace features you can find out all the functions in a dll and through tracing, you can trap the results returned from a "IS THEDONGLETHERE" call to the dll. You then write a DLL of the same name that always returns that value. Have done it many times. PM me with the software your using and I can get more details.

 

[mfenn]

There's good information here, but this is a necro of a 6 year old thread, so I'm going to lock it now.

mfenn
General Hardware Moderator