🚀 go-pugleaf

Hi.  I have some questions about the hardware of the Zeniths.  I know that 
they are IBM compatible, but when I was tinkering around I found some
inconsistencies between what I've seen in manuals and what actually goes on.

Ok, first of all I found a pin diagram of the 9 pin male serial mouse port.
One of the pins is supposed to supply +5 volts, but when I put my meter on it
it registered +12 volts!!!  What the...???  (I did measure it in DC voltage
too)


Second, I hooked my printer up to my printer port and turned it on, got it
ready, and printed out a file by typing "type file1 > lpt1", and it printed
out like it should.  Then I wrote a short assembler program to read the
status of the printer port.  Here is the main part of the code that does the
actual reading of the port:

mov ax,0
mov dx,03BCh
in ah,dx

This is supposed to read the status of the printer, and put the status byte 
into ah.  I ran the program using Turbo Debugger, and after the "in" 
statement, ah was FF.  

Well, then I DISCONNECTED my printer from the printer port, and ran the 
program again.  ah was STILL FF!!!  What the...???

If you could please explain this strange behavior of my hardware, I would
greatly appreciate it!

- Rich
  kennehra@logic.camp.clarkson.edu