Which windoze? 9x shouldn't be too bad. As someone else pointed out you
might need a VxD for real time critical use. Hope not as this would not be
fun. If you need NT support there'll be trouble. NT really doesn't like you
having non standard devices. I haven't personally done any development but I
know writing drivers for a parallel device that's not a printer is not fun.
I think the serial side of things is slightly better.

I'd hope you don't take more than a year to get it out the door or it'll be
obsolete already. If you search M$ for parallel port stuff the majority of
articles will probably be telling you how you should be using USB. If
possible I'd be going this way sooner rather than later. For one thing it''l
ease driver development incredibly. USB supports the notion of Device
classes which make truely generic drivers more of a reality. For instance,
there is a device class (and associated protocols) for Human Interface
Devices (i.e. devices that send info to/froma human) which would suffice for
practically any generic I/O device. Then, of course, there are device
classes for storage devices, legacy devices etc.  So basically you put the
Human Interface Device ID on your device and windoze figures out the driver
to talk to it. Then your software talks to the generic USB drivers and
voila, at least in theory.

I'm just waiting for news on the Mchip devices with USB support I heard
about.

Tom.
----- Original Message -----
From: Harold Hallikainen <haroldhallikainen@JUNO.COM>
Subject: Re: PC EPP interface to PIC
> On Fri, 20 Aug 1999 14:00:43 -0500 Tom Suzda <suzda@EXECPC.COM> writes:
> >Actaully, long term, the final goal is to have this controller I'm
> >working on, run under Windoze. The company has asked me
> >if I've gotten the Windoze driver written yet. I tell them, check
> >with me in a year or two. I'm just using the Generic driver for
> >testing purposes.
>         Since pretty much ALL devices that plug into a parallel port just
> have to exchange bytes of data back and forth, WHY do we have to keep
> adding drivers?  Windoze otta have a generic driver for EPP that we can
> just call.  I'd expect to be able to trap an interrupt, poll whether the
> device is ready for more data or has data waiting for me (and Windoze
> might FIFO it for me...), then a function to call where I pass data and
> another to call where I pick up data.
> Harold Hallikainen