Best OS for Win 98 Compatibility?

[Gristle McThornbody]

I have a very old program that is security protected using a dongle-type security device that connects to the parallel port. (I have the dongle.) I would like to be able to use this program using Compatibility Mode in either Windows 7 or Windows XP. Which OS is more likely to work, and/or which will be easier to set up?

BTW, are there ways to bypass or reverse engineer this very old security key so that it is not required any more? Parallel ports are hard to come by these days.

 

[tharve4007]

Windows 8 has a good compatibility mode, a little better than windows 7/vista's.

 

[Gristle McThornbody]

Thanks, but my options are XP and 7. Is one better than the other for this purpose?

 

[ex_bubblehead]

You may be out of luck there as most of the parallel port dongles of the day required direct hardware access and manipulation. This is blocked by design in XP and above. Using "Compatibility Mode" does not change this.

 

[llemm]

I read a while ago that starting from virtualbox 4.2 parallel port support has been enabled you might want to check that out

 

[The Stealthinator]

Your best option would be to run Windows 98 on your computer (not VM).

 

[I]

What about a USB to parallel port adapter? Not sure if it'd do the job but I'd try Win2K, since it has much larger memory support and is far more stable than 9x.

As for bypassing or reverse engineering, you might see if any of the filesharing sites have a disabled version of the app, or contact the company and see if they can do anything for you, they might have a patch themselves. There might also be some sort of hacker tutorials out there that give an example of how to edit an app to remove the hardware check.

 

[Northwestern]

What about a USB to parallel port adapter? Not sure if it'd do the job but I'd try Win2K, since it has much larger memory support and is far more stable than 9x.

As for bypassing or reverse engineering, you might see if any of the filesharing sites have a disabled version of the app, or contact the company and see if they can do anything for you, they might have a patch themselves. There might also be some sort of hacker tutorials out there that give an example of how to edit an app to remove the hardware check.

But OP isn't deciding on using any Windows 9x system. Both Windows 7 and XP support parallel ports when done right, but he might have better luck with Windows XP.