Old Parallel Port Dongles

[Unknown_K]

Is there a place that lists what programs old parallel port dongles go with?

I have a sentinel Pro Dongle from Rainbow Technologies , Inc Irvine CA and wanted to know what app it was meant for.

 

[twolazy]

I remember AutoCad 2000 (version schools used) had a similar dongle, same version I believe. There are a ton of early 3d terrain/modeling software that used Sentinel Pro as well.

 

[mdog69]

The sentinel dongle was used for lots of products. The only external clue is what's on that sticker, and even then you'd be lucky if the OEM put their name on the sticker, never mind which product it related to. Back in the day, virtually every dongle I saw had someone write the application name using a sharpie, because every man and his dog were using them. (my area was telecoms, and they were used to licence local craft terminals and network management workstations).

 

[NeXT]

Vague by design. Making it worse, some dongles just because they are for one software package does not mean they will work because they were paired at the factory for a specific serial number. 3DS Max was bad for that.

 

[ldkraemer]

Those Dongles were basically three hardware counters that incremented/decremented as each
counter was accessed. There were also three counters in memory that were incremented/decremented
at the same time. At the end of the counting sequence(s) if the counts did not match, the DONGLE was
MISSING, and the Software exited.

There was a CRACK to those things that modified the SERIAL number to bypass their usage.
I found that old TEXT file that the guy posted. It's attached.


Larry

 

[Chuck(G)]

I had a devkit for one of these--gave it away here years ago. Basically, you stick their code into yours and it checks to see if the thingummy is actually plugged in. Hacks to get around this abounded.

 

[Unknown_K]

Would still be nice to know what app it was for.