Parallel Port Driver Development Concepts
Other versions of this page are also available for the following:
8/28/2008
The parallel port drivers are used only for printing, not for general data transfer. They use the IEEE 1284 compatibility mode in the forward direction, and nibble mode in the reverse direction. Each parallel port driver builds into a Parallel.dll file.
The parallel port is a bi-directional port based on the Centronics parallel interface with the enhanced scalable parallel processing (SPP) mode, also known as a bi-directional SPP mode. Parallel port drivers have limited bi-directional support.