I was right: the reason is disabled LPT port. When I enabled this port in BIOS, Puff started working properly - so we have temporary solution.

...but it is easy to add an "if" in a right place to detect if we're sending to LPT. This bug can be corrected without writing LPT emulation... i think.

ps.
Programmers - thank you all for writting such unique & usefull code. Every student of computer science that I know is using DOSBox.

DOSBOX *does not support LPT* at all... I cannot see how allowing/disalowing it in BIOS could have influence on anything inside DOSBOX...
Internally DOSBOX uses "dummy" LPT just for the Disney sound emulation.
In the new CVS there is some "dummy" LPT device (for games which crash otherwise), but even that has nothing in common with the *real* LPT (as far as I know).

Edit: Rereading your post again - I guess you meant that enabling LPT helps in the Windows, not in DOSBOX... Ok, try the latest CVS, it may help (there is a *dummy* LPT port )

Mirek

This is what I think, i'm not sure of it:

DOS programs can use the int21 functions originally designed for writing to a disk file in other way - to write to any DOS device (CON, LPT*,others). Windows XP seems to react the same way - it's trying to send any data directed into file "LPT1" to the real port. The error occures if the real port does not exist.

Anyway the dummy LPT should help. Thanks very much.

ps. I'm just playing Syndicate Wars. Protected mode works great!

I am having this exact issue. I have a brand new 8/7/2006 laptop running Windows XP media edition with SP2. When I run DOSBox from the command line or with D-fend on one of my DOS games I get this runtime error.

So my question is what exactly is the work around?

How would I enable LPT port in bios?

Can the LPT port be configured in the DOSBox.config ?[/img]

What game? Are you using dosbox 0.65?

wd,

I am running 0.65.

The game is:

Decision Games
WAR IN EUROPE
a program by Greg Ploussios
v2.01 Rules, 3/98

In this directory DOSBox created a stdout.txt with this in it:

CONFIG:Loading settings from config file C:\DOCUME~1\OWNER~1.YOU\LOCALS~1\Temp\Temporary Directory 1 for dfend_v2_beta_2.zip\Confs\CWIE-1.conf
MIDI:Opened device:win32
Warning: file creation failed: C:\CWIE-1\WIE\LPT1

If I just run DOSBox I just get the Runtime Error 008

Please note the following:

I am running on a laptop I just bought. It is running Windows XP Media Edition with SP2 and I can play this DOS game via Windows but in certain dialog boxes of the game the text is garbled. In the past I used a desktop machine with DOSBox 0.63 and D-fend just fine and played the game with sound and no garbled text. On another desktop machine I can run the game with out DOSBox and no garbled text. So it would appear to be machine speicfic. However the LPT1 error perplexes me.

try a cvs build.
(see the development forum) I added a fake LPT1 device to it for problems like that.

Qbix,

Which CVS build did you add the fake LPT1 device to?

Thank you.

All the cvs builds released since 2006-04-16 have a simple dummy lpt1 that qbix added.

That fixed it. I downloaded the CVS build from ykhwong worked like a charm.

In native Windows the game runs faster, but the text is garbled. In DOSBox 0.65 with the 20060809 build patch over it, I can seemlessly flip from Windowed Mode to Full Screen, and run the game with no garbled text. There is some speed issues I am trying to figure out, but all is very well.

Thank you!