Downtown Doug Brown

I’ve already gotten my Willem programmer working in Windows 7 with a custom DLL, so I figured why not do the same in Wine under Linux? I meant to make directions for this earlier, but the last time I looked at this, Wine had a bug that made it really annoying to build 32-bit DLLs on 64-bit Linux. That’s all fixed now, so here we go. These instructions are tested with Ubuntu 14.04 with Wine 1.6. Some older versions of Wine had problems, so this is all I can test with.

Warning: This DLL is slow, and these instructions are fairly complicated. I don’t really want to supply prebuilt binaries, and it requires some special work that might have to be repeated when new versions of Wine are installed due to updates. I’m also too lazy to make it configurable, so you need to change a #define in the code if your parallel port is at an I/O address other than 0x378. If you’re still feeling brave, here’s what I have:

Get your parallel port address

First of all, figure out your parallel port address. Type the following command:

cat /proc/ioports | grep parport

You should see something like this:

  0378-037a : parport0

In this case, the output means my parallel port is at 0x378. Remember this address; we will customize it when we compile the DLL.

Download the DLL source code

Download the DLL source code here:

io_dll_willem_linux.tar.gz

Extract it. If your parallel port is at an address other than 0x378, open up io_main.c and update the LPT_BASE_ADDR define near the top of the code to match your parallel port address.

Install prerequisites

These packages will probably be necessary to make everything work. I hope I got all of them, but I may have forgotten something. If I forgot something, I apologize. Let me know in the comments.

sudo apt-get install build-essential wine1.6-dev gcc-multilib

Build the DLL

Inside the DLL source directory, type:

make

Assuming everything goes without error, you should find the file io.dll.so which is the DLL we will be using.

Install the DLL

Remove any io.dll from your Wine installation. It’s useless inside of Wine anyway, so there’s no need for it. Make sure there’s no io.dll file next to EpromM51.exe either. I’m trying to make sure that Wine doesn’t look anywhere else for this DLL. Now, we’re going to put the io.dll.so file in a place where Wine can find it:

sudo cp io.dll.so /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/wine/

I messed around, but couldn’t get this to work without putting it right in Wine’s library directory. There might be a better way to do this, but this was the best I could find.

Even if you’re on a 64-bit system, you’ll find that this DLL gets compiled as a 32-bit DLL. So /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/wine is always the correct location for this library, regardless of whether your system is 32-bit or 64-bit.

Set up permissions

Here’s the weird part. Raw port access doesn’t work unless you’re root, or you allow the program to have capabilities to access I/O ports. Running things as root is a bad idea, so let’s give the program capabilities to access the I/O ports. Warning: This could pose a potential security threat to your system. We’re actually going to be giving all Wine programs access to the I/O ports.

Here’s the magic command that allows Wine programs to use raw I/O:

sudo setcap cap_sys_rawio=ep /usr/bin/wine-preloader

You may or may not have to re-run this command every time you update Wine. I just don’t know. Anybody else have a better solution for direct port access? I hate having to mess with wine-preloader, but I don’t want to create a separate daemon or whatever due to the added latency.

All done

If you’re followed all these directions, it’s very possible that your Willem programmer is all ready to go now. Give it a shot. I hope this helps someone out there.

Boring details for developers

For anyone who’s interested in how I did this, I created this DLL by taking the original io.dll, fixing its header file so it doesn’t use weird typedefs that confuse winedump, and then running this command:

winedump spec io.dll -I . -t -C

After that, I ran this command:

winemaker . --nosource-fix --dll --nomfc -D__WINESRC__ --wine32

This gave me everything I needed to get this to work. I also had to fix up the generated code–for example, I commented out the line: #include “config.h” in io_main.c.