I'm using Delphi to develop real-time control software and over the last couple of years I have done some work running older Windows installations under Microsoft's VirtualPC and it works fine for 'pure software' development (i.e no or limited access to the outside world). Such tools seem able to work with network connections but I have to maintain software which performs I/O via the parallel port (via a device driver). We also use USB I/O. In the past I've liked Microsoft's virtual tools because it takes time to install a new operating system and then (in my case) install Delphi and a load of libraries and components to provide development support. In these circumstances I've not been too bothered by my lack of access to the low-level I/O ports.
I want to up my game and I'm happy to pay for a good virtualisation tool IF I can have access from it to the outside world, i.e I want to be able to configure it to allow access to my machine's parallel port and com ports in the same way as if it was running natively. This access has to be able to expose the parallel port in register terms, i.e to 'see' the port at address $03f8 for example and to support I/O operations of those registers (via the appropriate kernel access) as my Windows 7 64-bit installation is able to do.
I see that there are a number of virtualisation solution out there now but it's quite hard to acertain the capability of each at such a low level. Does anyone have any experience or knowledge in this area?
The VMware products would be suited best for this. You can add virtual serial and parallel ports and forward them to a physical port on the host, or even to a file or a named pipe.
You can also connect any USB device that is connected to the host machine.
This works with VMware Workstation, but might even work with the free VMware player too.
Related
I'm getting started with freeRTOS. I went through the documentation provided in freeRTOS.org, and had some practice with some demo projects. My question is how to install freeRTOS without using the win32 port (since it is only an emulator that doesn't provide real time behaviour)? Is it possible to install freeRTOS as a standalone OS, or is it necessary to use linux kernel or windows?
FreeRTOS is a real time operating system kernel. It's not a fully blown OS, it's just the kernel. You don't "install" FreeRTOS like you would windows or a ubuntu distro on an x86 PC. You build a project and use freeRTOS to schedule tasks, manage memory resources etc. In general, you need a different microcontroller/processor than one you're developing on as your platform.
If you want to use only your laptop, then you'll need to simulate a "target" processor (that's what that option is). You won't be able to achieve "real time" results (windows will get in the way), but you can get pretty close.
The first thing I'd do is get an eval kit for whatever microcontroller you want to actually use/target/develop on.
I'm relatively new to c# and the XNA, but using several tutorials and books I succeed at creating a simple game. The problem is, that i have only one computer and i want to test the game's networking features. So i have installed VMware Workstation and created a Virtual PC running Windows 7 Professional x86. On my host PC I'm running Windows 7 x64. I bridged both PC's and now i can share files between them flawlessly. But unfortunately when i run my game on both of them, create a session on the first, it seems that the second can't find and join that session. I tried to run another games like Quake and the result was the same - it looked like both PC's don't see each other. I also tried with installing Hamachi on both machines - no result again.
So my question is - is it possible to run XNA game which uses Windows Live for creating and joining a session on a host PC and virtual one.
Thank you in advance :)
make sure to use bridged networking in VM settings.
you can then specify different IP's on host / guest.
Also, try to stick it with IPv6
If you're just trying to test networking features and not simulate lag you can run multiple clients on 1 computer.
You should be able to find the session just the same as if you were running over the net/Lan.
Note:
Personally I've only done networking with Lidgren's network library so I'm not sure if using XNA's built in library works the same but it could be worth a try.
Edit:
Thought it was worth mentioning if you're running in the editor it won't let you run multiple clients directly, so publish your game to a local folder and run from there. You can also run one from the editor to get any debug messages or exceptions that occur.
I heard about USB to LPT adapters that are capable of mapping PC legacy parallel port address. What is the level of such mapping? I mean - is it possible to access the adpater's pins by using 'in' or 'out' x86 assembler instructions (in Windows or Linux)? If not, what does it mean that the addresses are mapped? What kind of emulation is this?
Thanks.
Marcin
A mapping from legacy I/O port addresses to a USB device is most likely handled by trapping the port access in kernel mode operating system code. For several generations of systems now, the operating system has been able to impose itself between application code and the hardware in such a way that even things that look like raw hardware access to the application are not necessarily so.
Effectively, when the processor comes upon that raw port access, it isn't executed but an operating system service routine is called instead.
I am aware that there are programs out there like lojack for laptops that get installed on the BIOS, but I'm still a little confused. When reading about lojack, it seems to me that they can't fully located the laptop's location until the user logs in and tries to access the internet. So I'm thinking that it's a BIOS application so that it wouldn't matter if the thief reformats the HD.
So my question is, does anyone have any ideas of how an internet enables BIOS application would be written. I'm not looking for full answers -- just ideas or resources to get started. For example, is such a thing written in assembly? Once one such app is written, how does it get transfered to the BIOS.
Does the BIOS program itself recognize that there is an internet connection (when the thief logs on to the OS). Or upon logon, does additional processes get spawned? Are there any resources/websites that anyone can direct me too?
You didn't mention whether you were interested in legacy BIOS or EFI BIOS, but I would mention that with EFI there is the capability of writing EFI applications. See Intel Press:
Harnessing the UEFI Shell
The EFI Application toolkit comes with a complete TCP/IP network stack:
http://www.intel.com/technology/efi/toolkit_overview.htm
More at tianocore.org
Regarding "LoJack"-style solutions, one of the providers of this technology is Absolute Software's Computrace product.
Basically there are 3 components: 1) a software component that runs in the OS; 2) a BIOS component which is baked into the system BIOS (accomplished via Absolute working with the PC vendor); 3) servers at Absolute software that talk to the PC.
For more information on how it works visit:
http://www.absolute.com/en/company/Computrace-Persistence.aspx
(see especially the demo video on this site)
To learn something about BIOS, one good source is coreboot.org. It is an open source BIOS (or firmware) and support some physical machines.
Legacy BIOS is written in assembly language, but new generations, such as UEFI or coreboot, are written mostly in C language. BIOS program is stored in the ROM, and executed by the CPU automatically.
The BIOS program itself does not access the internet or perform any of the advertised functions. The LoJack addition to the BIOS firmware is a file copying/patching utility - at boot up it can check the harddrive for a copy of Windows and proceed to silently install/repair the LoJack service if it has been removed. The service itself includes several measures to lower it's profile and prevent itself from being disabled (similar to how many trojans and malware run several processes that each restore the other if one is disabled or killed).
The LoJack BIOS program can't do anything if a unsupported operating system (like Linux) is installed after the harddrive is wiped.
I have a Delphi application that reads/writes to a COM port connected to a large hardware device, so I don't usually have the hardware available during development. That said, the communication protocol is fairly simple, so I can generally do the development and have someone onsite test it, and it usually works. Occasionally I run into a harder problem, though. To solve this, I'd like to setup a virtual COM port where one side of the COM port is my application and the other side is a very simple COM port debug console (similar to the old modem terminal programs), where ASCII commands my app sends are logged onscreen and I can type in some ASCII command to send back to my application to simulate the hardware device. I've been unable to find any tools that provide a virtual/software COM port and a console/terminal to debug with. Does anyone have software suggestions and steps to set something like this up?
The software/virtual COM port and terminal need to support Windows 7 64-bit (or Vista 32 if necessary).
I'm doing something similar with paired virtual COM ports created by
http://com0com.sourceforge.net/
I'm using Advanced Virtual COM Port and I'm quite happy with it. Not free, but works like a charm - even with Win7-x64.
Can't you just insert a redirector at the lowest level of your application which will pop up a console instead of writing data to COM? Should not take long.
I can't vouch for it, but sounds like something like this is what you're looking for. http://www.windows7download.com/win7-free-virtual-serial-ports-emulator/yarqmowu.html
I have used Eterlogic's Virtual Serial Ports Emulator successfully for exactly this on a laptop with no serial ports. It's a bit easier to set up than Com0Com, which I have also used. It's also useful for serial port spying if you need to reverse engineer any communications
The 32-bit version is free, the 64-bit version is currently $25. Try it out on Vista32 to see if it does what you need.
I use Com0Com for this purpose, but I don't know whether it works with anything more recent than Windows XP.