What was the last notebook/laptop ever made with at least two legacy ports?

[njroadfan]

The parallel port and the floppy controller are another story. The death of the parallel port is directly attributable to Windows Vista. Any Windows OS, Vista or newer, has _no_ native parallel port support. So, why bother to add a port to your machine, if 99% of the users won't be able to use it?

I have Windows 7 64-bit on a Core2Duo machine. It fully supports the on-board ECP parallel port (hanging off of the LPC bus at LPT1) and even PnP auto-detected the HP Laserjet 4MP that is plugged into it! I don't think Windows 8 dropped support either.

 

[ajacocks]

I have one of these PCI Serial/Parallel cards:
http://www.sybausa.com/productInfo.php?iid=604
You have to run a provided DOS utility to make it change its I/O addresses to the default standards, but once you do it is hardware compatible. If your DOS application happens to know how to directly access any I/O port and you tell it where the PCI PNP set the address, then it could access it without running the utility.

The PCIe version is probably similar.

I have the PCIe version. It is definitely not compatible with 2 different vendors' parallel-port EPROM burner software. The DOS software does indeed let you pick the I/O and DMA settings, but there's something that just doesn't quite play nicely.

I have Windows 7 64-bit on a Core2Duo machine. It fully supports the on-board ECP parallel port (hanging off of the LPC bus at LPT1) and even PnP auto-detected the HP Laserjet 4MP that is plugged into it! I don't think Windows 8 dropped support either.

That's interesting to hear. I was told by someone that I would have expected to know, though I don't have a Windows 7 machine, with a built-in parallel port, and I don't have Windows Vista, or 8, at all.

Thanks!
- Alex

 

[yuhong]

Well, perhaps they are in that in the PC world they use legacy (8237-type) 8-bit DMA (channel 2) and are pretty much tied to IRQ 6. There are, of course, some floppy controllers that allow changes in port, IRQ and DMA, but they generally have their own drivers and don't work well with low-level (e.g. IMD) software.

And BTW Intel has began to remove the 8237 completely from things like Haswell-ULT which combines the PCH and the CPU into a single chip. As far as I know the ordinary desktop/laptop PCH still have it, though as I said before they removed PC/PCI DMA support used by PCI to ISA bridges in ICH6.

 

[Chuck(G)]

We're sort of getting into the territory anyway where perhaps a good solution is to take an x86 MCU, say, an 80C188, stick the vintage peripherals on it and run a USB interface to the more modern host. PCI slots for consumer desktops are rapidly decreasing in number. This would keep the laptop folks happy as well.

 

[ajacocks]

That would definitely be an interesting solution. I wonder how low the IC count could be kept, and if we could build this in a board that is possible for a hobbyist to build? I.e., no/limited SMD components, 2 layer board, etc.

- Alex