I am going from personal experience. I have a logic analyzer from Agilent that works in parallel port and works correctly on Win2K. I also have a Bytek ChipBlaster/Universal that works on parallel port and its software works good in Win2K. I have written a number of apps which work in a DOS box environment that those access certain I/O ports (including parallel port) and work correctly under Win2K to the best of my recollection. None of this stuff works at all on WinXP or on WinVista/32.

I have made Windows apps that run as native Windows programs, VC++ or VB6, that access parallel port hardware on Win2K and those were done using the InpOut32 DLL. Do not expect screaming performance of being able to poll in status or toggle output lines very fast though.

My most recent thing in this area was to program a T43 laptop as a data receiver using nibble mode handshaking in VB6. That used VB6 under Win2K and implemented a protocol very similar to that used by the old file transfer program LapLink. The transmit end was an assembly language driver that was embedded inside of a SBC based system custom Boot Rom. I was trying to debug the boot ROM in real time and good old tools like SoftIce that used to work for this type of thing are completely broken on modern SBCs (single board computers). The link captured data dumps from the ROM based program and let them be viewed, printed, and saved to files on the Win2K laptop.

Michael Karas