Re: Interfacing to parallel port dongle via USB adapter

is

Aha! What if Paul built a little go-between circuit that issues a strobe whenever there is a change on any of the data lines? Or maybe he could find out if this type dongle possibly uses only one or two data bits.

That's what TI told me when I asked them about how to run one of their older JTAG controllers. They said that most USB converters don't work but the parallel port PCI or PCMCIA card usually does.

is

Certainly no biggie to capture the 8 I/O bits and the status/control bits of any exchanges between the host and the dongle.

The next step, however, would only be "fun" if you live and breathe reverse-engineering of data sequences. A whole truckload of data would likely be sent to the dongle before a response is solicited, and when you see the response you don't know how much of the preceding output was just padding (aka obfuscating garbage) and how much was the key which the dongle is waiting for. You also can't even be certain that the response is triggered by a byte value or a handshake line (or a combination) in the immediate pre-response period - it could be told to delay response by a certain number of bytes, and that could also be variable.

The capture process needs to be independent of the "official" strobe on pin 1, so a byte_value_change_detector would be required. A suitable comms analyser would do most of that work, or a simple home-built interface tied to a PC would certainly be able to capture the lot. BUT much existing software for these purposes is strobe-dependent, so a little code-bashing would also be in order unless the change detector latched the byte and generated a strobe pulse..

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Sounds like a major science project, IMHO not worth it. I'd switch to a better CAD software. Mine does not need a dongle and I most certainly would not have bought it if it did. To me a dongle has about the level of professionalism as a circuit board with the part numbers filed off.

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Regardless, that was the only way certain software apps were sold for about a ten year period. For you not to know that really says a lot about your experiences.

The dongle was not about a lack of professionalism, idiot. It was about KEEPING things professional and keeping authentication where it belongs... somewhere besides within the software itself. To keep software theft to a minimum, that segment of the industry used dongles.

You're lucky it didn't catch on, or we might all have a USB dongle stick on our machines where everything from the OS to a text editor might need a chip added to the stick.

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Nope. Why then did OrCad SDT sell sans dongle? In Europe they sold with dongle so while I was living there I bought it in the US. Very simple. SPICE was sold without dongle. Same with all the beam field simulators and so on. So, tell us, which software was there that someone you deem "experienced" would have absolutely needed and where there was no non-dongle alternative?

Right. And then the printer wouldn't work anymore or the whole stack of dongles broke the D-Sub off. Seen it several times. Very professional indeed. The worst one was where the stack cracked the first dongle in line and the SW mfg balked at replacing it without forking over a major wad of cash. Also very professional, ain't it?

There are reasons why it diodn't catch on. Some them were outlined in this here thread ;-)

Joerg wrote

The original SDT was without a dongle, but I believe SDT/386 did come with one in Europe. We are talking c. 1993 now. I still run SDT/386 (runs fine in a 640x480 DOS box) but purchased in the USA. If I was doing heavy schematic design I would knock up a DOS PC with an old Video-7 1280x1024 video card from Ebay. Such a 'workstation' would be unbeatable for speed and usability.

The problem with Orcad - and incidentally this is another reason why so many users have gone on with hacked undongled copies of software they *bought* - is that while they has a brilliant DOS application, their windoze offerings were basically crap. I spent a year or two playing with Orcad for Windoze, here and there, trying to move over to it but it was full of bugs and the old SDT schematics did not move into the windoze version properly. Text labels would end up all over the place. Really stupid, since Orcad had control of the data and all undocumented fields etc so they could have done it properly. They presumably figured that forward compatibility would not matter, but they underestimated the market.

That's why I never moved to later versions of Protel. They started bloating their products, putting in loads of bugs, and bloating the price.

FPGA (Xilinx) software was always a problem with forward compatibility. I think this was why I stopped doing FPGA design - the tools were changing all the time and unless one was doing it all the time it was not worth the time and money. A lot of the early 1990s FPGA applications can now be so easily bit-banged with an AVR etc and then you have just the AVR assembler to keep running :)

To answer the original poster here, I doubt any USB-parallel adapter will work because IIRC every application that used a dongle would bit-bang direct to the hardware. This worked as far as windoze 95 or so. The drivers for the USB chips are not that clever; I sell some in my business and they implement only the bare standard interface.

Unfortunately the more expensive the software, the more expensive it is to have a dongle (or a network license, which is essentially a "network card" dongle).

ORCAD, PADS, Pulsonix, Microwave Office, HFSS, ADS, Ansoft Design... all require a network license or dongle.

Then I am lucky, getting away with non-dongle apps. Cadsoft-Eagle, DesignCAD-3D, LTSpice (free...), some beam field SW, etc. None of them needs dongles. Some do require registration and then a clandestine distributor would have his tracks and all right there in the distributed copy. I've never done that and don't use any hacked SW, and appreciate that some vendors trust people.