In Dr. Dobb's Journal about 2 (maybe?) years ago there was an article
     on writing a special ring 0 device driver that would allow access to
     any PC port _directly_ while running under NT. There was some example
     code to access the parallel port directly, which I tried out of
     curiosity, and which worked. There should be no reason why it wouldn't
     work with the serial port as well. Best of all, the code was already
     written. All one should need to do to make it work for the serial port
     is change the port addresses appropriately and recompile. Since the
     device driver runs at the ring 0 security level (the highest) it can
     grant access to any physical port, whereas the application programs
     run at a lower security level (ring 3 I think), which prevents them
     from accessing any physical port directly.

     This might make it possible to use all those serial port PIC
     programmers with Windows NT. Note that this device driver is probably
     not a good idea for a novice since messing with NT's security layers
     could be dangerous (read - data loss).

     Note that this stuff only works if you have administrator access to
     NT. The trick is to use a 3rd party utility to load the device driver
     _after_ NT has booted, then when you are finished you can unload it
     again to return NT to normal operation. A WWW link to this utility is
     provided in the article, it was written by someone other than the
     author of the article.

     A scan of the DDJ index at www.ddj.com tells me that it was the May
     '96 issue.


     CIAO - Martin.

     P.S. if anyone gets their PICSTART to work under NT with this method,
     please let me know, I'm curious.


______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________
Subject: Re: PICSTART Plus problems
Author:  pic microcontroller discussion list <PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU> at
Internet
Date:    6/9/98 8:42 PM


PicStart Plus DOES NOT run on Windoze NT.
There are differences in the behaviour of the com apis between Win95 and
NT.
Microchip has not been able (does not want to) to correct this. If you
complain about this, all you get is an answer like "we are working on
it, but there is no schedule..."

BTW, same can be said about the Zilog ICE Interface for Windows. - Did
you know that they sell an Emulator for many of the Z8 MCUs for 99$?

Andreas

Bo Berglund wrote:
>
> I bought a PicStart Plus package including the programmer last week.
> But I can't make it work at all!
>
> Here is my system setup:
> - MPLAB 3.40 (I tried with 3.31 too)
> - PIC16F84
> - Picstart Plus connected to various COM ports
> - WinNT4 WS with SP3 applied
> - Pentium II 300 MHz CPU + 96 Mb RAM etc
>
> What happens is that I get an error message when I try to select the com port
and/or when I enable the programmer. It si not always possible to enable it
even.
> But if it was possible then I always get a message telling me to reset the
programmer (how is that done? no reset button visible). It simply will NOT work.
>
> What am I doing wrong here?
> Is MPLAB not compatible with NT4 maybe? But I also tried it on a Win95OSR2
system without success.....
>
> Please if anyone else encountered this problem and solved it, help!
>
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