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USB HASP KEY

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2017-06-21
2017-06-21
  • George Contreras

    Hi Schaars and Mendelson,

    I'm still making lots of stress tests on VDOS with the apps I use, but one of them is a bit troublesome and it put "a rock in my shoe" last night, that one needs to check an USB HASP KEY and I can't make it work. Have you seen something like this before? I cant find something like this with in the forums.

     
    • Jos Schaars

      Jos Schaars - 2017-06-21

      Never heard of a DOS program (being able) accessing an USB port. Could it be a parallel or serial key attached to USB-to… adapter?
      If so, you could try LPTd/COMd = LPTw/COMw: (mind the ending colon) in config.txt. d being the DOS port number, w that of Windows.

      Jos

       
  • George Contreras

    Hi, Thanks for the answer, this is the source of my nightmares, it's a HASP 4 device, normaly I run the driver instalation in Windows and after that, it creates this line in the C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG.NT

    device=%SystemRoot%\system32\haspdos.sys

    I don't know if changes something else but actually works with MS-DOS.

    When I start the App, it checks this little "dongle".

     
    • Jos Schaars

      Jos Schaars - 2017-06-21

      I wasn’t aware dongles are still being used.
      You say it actually works with MS-DOS, but that would be NTVDM?

      I have to do some guessing:

      • The software (the linked security library) will communicate with the “haspdos“ DOS device that is installed by device=… in config.nt.
      • That device driver will forward the status, read and write operations to the dongle, so the software only has to deal with an uniform device, not the nasty details (parallel, USB…).
      • In the DOS ages, that driver would then communicate directly with the hardware, now with the Windows driver that is installed for the dongle.
      • That leaves how does that basically DOS driver communicate with the Windows driver. Could be it is writing and reading data by opening that Windows device as a file.

      vDos doesn’t support loading device drivers since this was never needed. But some utilities exists to do that at runtime. Attached DEVLOAD and DEVLOD. If I recall correctly, DEVLOD could do the job, once used to test loading a software FPU?

      If the driver indeed uses the extended DOS calls introduced with Windows 95, vDos doesn’t support that neither. But vDosPlus claims to do so.

      A long shot in the dark, but you could give it a try.

      If it doesn’t work, you are out of luck. It wouldn’t be that hard to fake a “haspdos” device in vDos. But what I assumed so far would have to be confirmed, with some basic information how the device driver is supposed to work (mostly connect to what Windows device).

      I also guess that software will also have a Windows version.

      Jos

       
  • George Contreras

    Thanks a lot Jos, I'll try with devlod and if got lucky, post it here. :)

     
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