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Hello together,
I have a problem with my dongle. I have new PC and there is no printer port any more, so I can't put in the sentinel. So I used an USB to parallel cable to insert our dongle, after that I installed the Sentinel Protection Installer V7 and executed the program. After that I also got the same error message as before. When I configure the sentinel about SetupSysDriver.exe, I have no chance to configure it, because there were two options ISA and USB and no change has influence on the error in µVision. So does anyone has an idea to solve the problem?
Thanks
Thommy
For a laptop, you may be able to find a PC-Card or ExpressCard supporting a printer port. For a PC, you should look into adding a PCI printer card.
Or see if Keil can provide a USB dongle. Printer-port dongles are a (since long) dead technology giving a lot of grief.
"For a laptop, you may be able to find a PC-Card or ExpressCard supporting a printer port. For a PC, you should look into adding a PCI printer card."
Even if you do manage to find such hardware, you may still have issues finding appropriate drivers.
Much better, I think, to just get on to Keil to properly resolve the licence issue..
"...giving a lot of grief."
Oh yes!
Note that you can find such boards that does not need any special driver because they implement a standard PCI-connected printer port.
The built-in peripherials of a PC are either connected to PCI (or PCI-E) or on a PCI-to-ISA bridge.
PCMCIA was a laptop-format version of the original ISA bus, while Cardbus is basically PCI.
But you are correct - it is possible to implement the board/card in a way that you will need separate drivers.
I was thinking more of the driver for the dongle - rather than the card itself.
This whole dongle business was built for Win-NT (or earlier?); there were driver issues with getting it to work even on XP - so I'd hate to think what it's going to be like on a new computer with Vista or Win-7...
Yes, dongles are evul. And LPT dongles are the worst of the worst, since they are relying on ancient hardware. Printers just are not built for LPT use anymore, so computers are not built with printer ports.
Quite frankly, any type of copy protection will guarantee large costs for the buyer by reducing their ability to use the license they have payed for. And if the company who made the program closes operation, the license may suddenly be totally unusable. The machine it runs on may die. The hw lock may die. The OS may get an update that is incompatible.
"LPT dongles are the worst of the worst, since they are relying on ancient hardware"
Not only are they relying on ancient hardware, they are also relying on using it to a purpose for which it was never designed - which is why the USB-to-LPT adaptors are useless here.
Back in the Triscend days, their JTAG adaptor (among others) also used the LPT port. Although the Keil dongle was supposed to provide a pass-though for other devices on the LPT pot, it didn't work - and we had to come to a "special arrangement" with Keil to be able to debug Triscend!
"Quite frankly, any type of copy protection will guarantee large costs for the buyer by reducing their ability to use the license they have payed for"
Indeed - and often it's more cost to the bona fide user than to the hacker!
But software "node-locking" and "licence manager" solutions are no better - they cause just as much grief as hardware dongles.
In fact, I would prefer a hardware key - it makes it really simple to just install the software on every PC, and only allow the appropriate number of concurrent uses.
Hello once again,
thanks for the answers. To do another try, I put in my pc an PCI-Board with a parallel connector an to serial connectors. Than I installed the driver for the card and I could see than the parallel port with name LPT3. Than I went to the configuration software for the key and put in the new settings (I tried addresses 0x0278, 0x0378 and 0x0278 an 0x03BC) put it did not work. After that I tried it at home at my good old Win ME PC and look there it worked.
Thanks and greetings
from LPT1
Note that the LPT dongles would work much better if they where implemented as an ECP/EPP-compatible printer.
Most dongle designs are from before the ECP/EPP standard.
And not only that - the dongles are implemented to be transparent, to allow you to place a printer behind the dongle. Until Windows 98 and ME, you could play directly with the I/O hardware in the PC. From Win NT, Win 2k and forward, a program can no longer touch the hardware but must have a driver as intermediary.
A ISA or PCI-connected (including PCI-E, Cardbus, ...) printer port should have the hardware capabilities needed for a dongle. But a modern PC operating system do not allow software to do dirty tricks with the hardware. Adding a PCI board with a printer port will make the PC hardware able to support the lock - it will not automatically let a new OS be compatible with a program written for an older OS.
Because of this, the larger hw lock companies (Hasp et al) have since long sold newer lock technologies that are compatible with todays PC hardware and compatible with todays operating systems.
A USB-based HW lock that looks like some standard two-way device (such as a serial port that echoes back the received data after encryption) can use standard PC drivers, and will work even with "tomorrows" operating systems.
A system that abuses the hardware to do something it wasn't designed for is more-or-less doomed to not be future-proof. Such a design would require a huge market share for OS vendors to care about them.