QuickBasic Cafe Forum

Hi everybody,

i´m newby quickbasic programming, but i heard it was possible to use it for controlling serial and parallel ports. Anyone who knows informations about that and if programms already exist?

thanks,

Christiane.

Yes sure, I use a comport to send codes. I use the OUT command to do this and it runs QB in DOS but I have never been able to get it to work with any version of Windows including WFW.3.11 and Win.98se

V...

There is quite a lot of information spread around the web about writing to and from parallel ports.

I have just started exploring this myself as I am setting up some basic electronics control and measurement devices using an old PC I picked up for AU$10.

Do a search in Google for 'parallel port qbasic' and look at the first few results.

The basic commands are:
OUT(port#)
and
INP(port#)

From what I have read serial ports are a little more complex to use as they do not use TTL voltage levels like the parallel port. Therefore they cannot be interfaced directly with most IC's.

Just a quick note regarding use under Windows that I forgot to put in my last post.

I still use windows 98 se. Havent had a need to upgrade yet.
QBasic 4.5 works fine under this platform and I can control the parallel port all I need to. I have not tried control with the serial port, and this may be where windows 98 se may like to impose its controlling power.

Under later versions of windows control of the ports is controlled more. You may have to look at ways of getting access to your ports. Use under an NT environment seems to be pretty difficult.

You may want to look at making a Dos boot disk with QBasic attached that you could boot natively with.