Velleman K8000 - [NT programming]
The standard libraries, shipped with the K8000, don't work on a Windows NT platform. This means your K8000 is useless under Windows NT4, Windows 2000, or Windows XP. When trying to run on a NT system, your application will just crash.
The cause of your problems is not really a bug, it's just the way NT handles the I/O (input/output) ports. Where you can access all ports under Windows 98, Windows NT has a strict control over its I/O ports. You need to write a device driver, if you want to access I/O ports (because device drivers have a higher I/O access level than user mode applications). I tried finding more information on writing my own device driver, but it turned out nowhere. So, were there any existing device drivers?
After a search for device drivers, I first found the "NTPort Library", from ZealSoft. It worked great! But soon, I got tired of the shareware popups and stopped using it. I was prepared to pay for it, until ... I discovered a site with the "DriverLinx PortIO Driver". It was completely freeware!!! NTPort was removed from my system very quickly, why paying for something if you have an equivalent for free?
One of the disadvantages (let's say: the only one) of the DriverLinx driver is, you need 2 setups for one application. But it was the only way to do it, so I've learned how to live with it. Back to K8000: if I wanted to use the DriverLinx driver for my K8000, I needed to modify the source code (For Visual Basic). Or at least: the module which was shipped with the K8000. This is done for compatibility reasons, now I could upgrade a Windows 98 project to a Windows 2000 project very quickly.
There are a few steps you need to take, before you can get your K8000 applications to work:
Now, you need to add some extra code to the Form's code window (see below). When you execute the project, I/O channel 1 will light up.