New version of JP1.2 serial driver - testing needed!

WagonMaster · Post by **WagonMaster** » Tue May 19, 2009 10:48 am

TheShanMan wrote:How possible is it for you to get it working in x64 windows (xp in my case)? I only run IR once every several years when I get a new remote (which I just did today), so I'm a perpetual noob and have to re-learn everything each time, but I'm fully willing to help with any testing you might need. In the meantime I guess I'll have to fire up a vmware image to use IR.

Hi ShanMan,

I'm not the author of the 'jp12serial.dll' library, but I'm working on a simple little test application (for Windows) which may result in some modifications to that DLL in the future, so your comment piqued my interest.

I'm a Linux guy so I rarely run Windows and I've never run the 64-bit version of XP, but I read up a little bit on it. It seems as if (none to my surprise) WinXP-64 supports running a 32-bit app calling a 32-bit DLL. In fact, here's a quote from a relevant webpage:

Charlie Russel, Microsoft MVP for Windows Server, Security and Tablet PC wrote:With Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, you can run both 64-bit and 32-bit applications side by side. Your existing 32-bit applications run in WOW64, while the 64-bit applications run natively. This makes it easy to transition to 64-bit applications at your pace—only moving when you're ready. You can even run 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the same application in Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, allowing you to evaluate the new version of an existing application and transition at a controlled pace.

The Wikipedia article on WOW64 says:

Wikipedia wrote:WoW64 (Windows-on-Windows 64-bit) is a subsystem of the Windows operating system that is capable of running 32-bit applications and is included on all 64-bit versions of Windows — including Windows 2000 Limited Edition, Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, IA-64 and x64 versions of Windows Server 2003, 64-bit versions of Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, as well as 64 bit editions of Windows 7. WoW64 is designed to take care of all the differences between 32-bit Windows and 64-bit Windows, particularly involving structural changes to Windows itself.

So I'm confused as to why 'IR.exe' + 'jp12serial.dll' wouldn't work on WinXP-64. What am I missing here? Can you please enlighten me?

Regards,
Bill

TheShanMan · Post by **TheShanMan** » Tue May 19, 2009 12:07 pm

I don't know actually, and yes 32 bit apps do work fine in x64. I'm guessing it has more to do with 32 bit apps having access to hardware. What I do know is when I launch IR it tells me "This driver has been blocked from loading. Please make sure you have Admin rights." And of course, I do have admin rights. From what little I was able to find by a search of the forums, I believe serial communications do not currently work in x64.

WagonMaster · Post by **WagonMaster** » Tue May 19, 2009 2:33 pm

TheShanMan wrote:I don't know actually, and yes 32 bit apps do work fine in x64. I'm guessing it has more to do with 32 bit apps having access to hardware. What I do know is when I launch IR it tells me "This driver has been blocked from loading. Please make sure you have Admin rights." And of course, I do have admin rights. From what little I was able to find by a search of the forums, I believe serial communications do not currently work in x64.

Interesting. Thanks for the reply.

The additional detail in your reply helped. I found this directly relevant post in this very forum which I suppose you may have already noticed.

To satisfy my own growing curiosity on this issue, I did a bit of web searching and am still somewhat puzzled. I saw some comments that seem to indicate that 64-bit versions of Windows (whether XP, Vista, or Server2008) require driver signing for kernel-mode drivers. I'm not certain if our innocent little 'jp12serial.dll' "qualifies" for such treatment, but I suspect it may, given that it semi-directly writes to the UART (RS-232 serial port chip). Personally, I don't consider the DLL to be a "driver" at all -- it's merely shared library code, but I don't know how loose Microsoft is with the terminology.

I saw a Microsoft document which talks about using the well-known 'F8' boot menu option to advantage:

That document wrote:An F8 Advanced Boot Option introduced with Windows Vista—“Disable Driver Signature Enforcement”—is available to disable the kernel-signing enforcement only for the current boot session. This setting does not persist across boot sessions.

It's not clear if WinXP-64 offers anything similar, but you might give it a try.

I guess at this point I'm still confused as to whether anything can be done with the DLL ('jp12serial.dll') or the app ('IR.exe') or if this is something that's purely a problem with the operating system (WinXP-64) and its strict requirement for signed drivers in 64-bit mode.

Hopefully someone with more Windows XP-64 experience on this than I have (which is to say, "none"

) will jump in here and clarify.

Bill

TheShanMan · Post by **TheShanMan** » Sun May 24, 2009 1:46 pm

Scratch my claim that it's not 64 bit compatible. It actually is working fine now. I'm not sure what caused it to start working, but after it failed on 2 computers I tried it on my wife's and it worked. Now it's working on my 64 bit machine too.

WagonMaster · Post by **WagonMaster** » Mon May 25, 2009 9:43 am

Strange.... Glad to hear it's working OK now, though.

I'm still a bit concerned (especially given the very similar problem by 'Ube_Astard' from another thread that I mentioned earlier) that there might be something odd going on with 64-bit versions of Microsoft OSes. But I guess that until we get some more people reporting problems, we'll never know for sure. And that may take a while, given the probable (low) number of people running the 64-bit versions of WinXP and/or Vista with JP1 software.

Thanks for the update.

Bill