zPortOut and Talking to a Simple I/O Card

Keywords: 	   zPortOut  Communicating I/O Card

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Question:

I have looked on your web site and in the WinBatch Studio help files, but can find nothing on talking to a simple I/O card.

I have been using QuickBasic to talk to a 16 channel ISA relay card using code like:

10 BASE = &h3E0          "Base I/O address"
20 OUT BASE,2             "Turns on channel 1"
30 OUT BASE+1,4          "Turns on channel 10"

Can WinBatch control an I/O card using the "Binary" Functions, or is there a better way?

The card has no "drivers"

I have looked at the Help for those Functions but can not see how to translate the QuickBasic code to WinBatch Functions/Commands.

I am just starting to use WinBatch to convert many old DOS batch files and QuickBasic programs to a more Windows aware environment. I looked at Visual Basic but it doesn't appear to talk to anything without a driver. I'm hoping WinBatch can.

Answer:

Not sure.

Windows *generally* prohibits direct access to hardware. 95/98/ME has more exceptions than NT/2000

Perhaps for starters look into our "Serial" and "Parallel" extenders that allow near-direct communications with standard serial and parallel I/O devices.

Comments:

Just some feedback to let you know that I tried the sample program with the "Parallel" port extender and it seems to be working.

All I did was to use the "992" address for my relay card in the "zPortOut" command and the LED's across the relays blink in order!

I never thought of looking at the "Parallel" Extender because I thought it was for "printer" ports only.

Thanks for your help.

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Article ID:   W14780