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Comment by orbitingpluto | Hacker News Reader

That reminds me of how much I hated software license USB dongles.

After all the trouble I had with activating Windows and Office and whatnot, I have come to kind of appreciate dongles, actually. Migrating a license from one machine to another is as easy as unplugging the dongle and plugging it into the new machine.

OTOH, the company I work for has a customer that uses some ancient automation software to run an industrial plant, and that software uses dongles attached to the parallel port, and I mean the parallel port. Using USB-to-parallel-adapters does not work, and finding motherboards with parallel ports has become rather difficult. :-|

I've had one of these dongles fail before. Penalties for non-timely delivery made duplicating these dongles necessary.

And yes, those parallel port dongles were even worse. I suppose you might be able to find a PCIe parallel port card?

I've worked on several projects where we ended up having to crack that kind of protection - often, with the formal written blessing of the license owners, who were happy to continue to support our use but did not have the ability, resource, or sometimes, even the source code to the product anymore. This may be an option for your customer if they haven't tried it already. Sometimes a few hours of highly skilled RE work, even if you have to contract it out, can pay huge dividends in preventing downtime due to having to source antiquated hardware combinations or maintain broken software. We were even able to move some ancient, unreliable, insecure airgapped Windows 2000 server hardware into Windows Server on AWS where we could back it up, monitor it, and provide high availability and remote access. In my experience this can be the happy medium between "it's working, don't touch it" and "WTF this runs on DOS and the 30 year old machines break all the time"

> Using USB-to-parallel-adapters does not work, and finding motherboards with parallel ports has become rather difficult. :-|

These won't work either?

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1681515...

Hmm, the software could be hardcoded to LPT1. Most mobos still have the port on the chipset, they just don't have the headers. Not sure if you can re-assign LPT3 to LPT1..

The software runs on MS-DOS, I assume it is hardcoded to use LPT1.

If it runs on MS-DOS, it most probably isn't hardcoded to use "LPT1" (the DOS device), but instead is hardcoded to use the exact I/O port and IRQ normally assigned to LPT1 (according to Wikipedia, I/O port 0x378 and IRQ 7). Other than filesystem and disk access, software running on MS-DOS nearly always accessed the hardware directly.

I just found out that the piece in software is being rewritten from scratch (since the original vendor has gone out of business long ago). And since the new version is written by a contractor on behalf of the customer, it will not require a dongle or anything like that.

Dongles are awesome!! I work at a biotech company and we purchase a lot of bioprocessing equipment at auctions. Typically the s/w is like $10,000+ so they just sell us the PC with the installed s/w for a couple of hundred. These PCs have like XP era hardware that instantly shits the bed after a few months. Having dongles means you can install the software again on a fresh PC and carry over the license without having to re-prove that you have purchased the software separately. Haven't run into parallel port dongles yet.. /shudder

> Using USB-to-parallel-adapters does not work

Have you tried modifying the Device Manager configuration for the USB-to-parallel adapter to assign it the I/O port and IRQ traditionally associated with LPT1 (I/O port 0x3BC, IRQ 7)? Changing exactly those kinds of mappings are the whole (original) purpose of the Windows Device Manager :)

The other thing you could do, though, is just run the automation software in a VM, and map the USB parallel port to the VM's LPT1. It's the IBM z/OS philosophy :)

Thank you! I will pass the hint regarding the Device Manager on to our automation people!

But as far as I recall, the software runs on DOS (for real!), and attempts to run it inside a VM have not been very successful, because the link between the software and the PCL is very timing-sensitive or something like that. FreeDOS did not work, either; I got to install MS-DOS 6.22 on a few machines two or three years ago for that reason. It was fun actually, but finding three floppy disks for the installation media was ... challenging. ;-)

You can easily make a bootable CD-ROM for MS-DOS by using the boot emulation...

> mkisofs -b dos622_1.img . > \temp\dos6.iso

something like this, will get you a bootable CD that'll emulate a floppy and get you onto that first disk... It's probably easier to do a dump/restore set of whatever it is you need to install, or just make a boot floppy to load up MSCDEX & friends so you can xcopy as another solution.....

Parallel ports aren't too hard to find, there is PCI cards you can find with parallel ports.. Now ISA slots on the other hand....

I actually tried something along those lines, but I could not get it to work properly. The installation started normally, but when it was time to enter the second disk, the installer somehow did not accept the second disk.... :-|

On the upside, installing MS-DOS 6.22 from floppies took less than 15 minutes, and the freshly installed system booted withing 15 seconds. ;-)

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