Re: Accessing I/O Ports in Windows NT/2000

[dmitry@elros.cbb-automation.de (Dmitry A. Kazakov)]

On Thu, 17 Jan 2002 16:26:24 -0500, Jeffrey Glenn
<jeffrey.glenn@mail1.monmouth.army.mil> wrote:

>
>Ted Dennison wrote:
>
>> Jeffrey Glenn <jeffrey.glenn@mail1.monmouth.army.mil> wrote in message news:<3C45FC6C.2030208@mail1.monmouth.army.mil>...
>> 
>>>I've found that accessing the I/O ports on Windows 9x is rather easy, 
>>>but with Windows NT/2000 input and output instructions are privileged 
>> 
>> That's right. NT doesn't allow direct access to the hardware from a
>> user-mode program. If you want to do that, you have to write a Windows
>> device driver.
>> 
>>>Does anyone know of an Ada solution to accessing I/O ports on Windows 
>>>NT/2000?
>> 
>> This isn't a language issue, its an OS issue. What you need to figure
>> out is how to write a device driver for NT-class OS's. Anything you
>> learn about that can be translated into Ada quite easily.
>> 
>> Good places to get started are the Microsoft DDK website
>> (http://www.microsoft.com/ddk/ ) , and the newsgroups
>> comp.os.ms-windows.programmer.drivers
>> (http://groups.google.com/groups?group=comp.os.ms-windows.programmer.drivers)
>> and comp.os.ms-windows-programmer.nt.kernel-mode
>> (http://groups.google.com/groups?group=comp.os.ms-windows.programmer.nt.kernel-mode
>> ).
>
>I was (am) hoping that I would not have to learn about writing device 
>drivers for Windows NT. I realize that Ada doesn't provide these 
>facilities, but I hoped to find that someone had already written such an 
>interface/wrapper package. Ada also doesn't support ODBC, TCP/IP, nor 
>Windows for that matter, but a lot has been written to bind with them.

There was a product by Blue Wave, I believe, called WinRT. It
contained a primitive Windows driver, which allowed you to read/write
arbitrary physical memory locations [= your I/O ports]. I think all
that you will need then is standard Win32 bindings and here you are.

Regards,
Dmitry Kazakov