LCDSmartie on a PCIe Parallel Port Card with VFD: 64-bit Windows Fix

ByPriya Nair

The Short Fix

Two things trip up this setup on modern hardware. Your PCIe LPT card has its own I/O address — not the standard 0x378 — and you need to find it in Device Manager before LCDSmartie will talk to anything. You also need a current copy of the InpOut driver built for 64-bit Windows. Sort both of those and the display comes up.

Why PCIe Cards Break the Standard Instructions

Every LCDSmartie tutorial tells you to enter 0x378 as the parallel port address. That’s LPT1 on an onboard port. A PCIe add-in card is different: the OS assigns it a free I/O range during boot, and that range is almost never 0x378.

Finding the real address takes about thirty seconds. Open Device Manager, expand Ports (COM & LPT), right-click your parallel port, go to Properties, then the Resources tab. You’ll see an I/O range listed there — something like E000–E007. The hex start value is what you type into LCDSmartie’s port field. Skip this step and you get a blank display with no error message to explain why.

The 64-bit Driver Situation

LCDSmartie is a 32-bit application. On a 64-bit Windows system it can’t access port I/O directly — it needs a kernel driver to broker that access. That driver is InpOut32, available from highrez.co.uk.

Two DLL files ship in the download package. inpout32.dll is for 32-bit apps running under WOW64 on a 64-bit OS. inpoutx64.dll is the native 64-bit build. Since LCDSmartie is a 32-bit application, it looks for inpout32.dll — but that DLL still installs a 64-bit kernel driver under the hood, which is why you need the current release from Highrez rather than an old copy floating around from 2007 or 2008.

Drop the DLL into the same folder as Smartie.exe and run LCDSmartie as Administrator at least once. That triggers the kernel driver installation. After that initial run you can switch to a scheduled task (covered below) to avoid the UAC prompt on every boot.

Does InpOut32 work with all PCIe LPT cards?

Not all of them. InpOut works by writing directly to real hardware I/O port addresses. Most PCIe parallel cards expose a genuine I/O range and work fine. Cards that use memory-mapped I/O instead, or USB-to-parallel adapters, don’t — there are no real port addresses for the driver to write to. Quick test: if Device Manager shows an I/O Range under Resources for your card, InpOut will likely work. If it only shows memory ranges, it won’t, and you’ll need a different approach entirely.

Configuring LCDSmartie for a VFD

Once the driver is in place and you have your address from Device Manager:

  • Open LCDSmartie and go to Setup.
  • Set the display type to HD44780 (Parallel). Most parallel-port VFDs use this interface even when the underlying chip isn’t an HD44780.
  • Enter your hex address in the port field — for example, 0xE000.
  • Set LCD Size to match your display’s actual dimensions.
  • If you see garbage characters or nothing at all, raise the timing multiplier to 5. VFDs are often slower to process commands than LCDs and need more settling time between writes.

There’s also an EPP-only mode in the port settings. Worth toggling if you’re getting partial output — some PCIe cards respond better to it.

Autostart Without a UAC Prompt Every Boot

Running elevated software at login normally means a UAC dialog. The standard workaround is Task Scheduler: create a task set to run at logon with highest privileges, pointing at Smartie.exe. Add -hide as a startup argument to bypass the main window and go straight to the system tray. The display starts silently with Windows and nothing interrupts the boot flow.

A Few Notes on VFDs Themselves

Vacuum fluorescent displays are self-emissive — no backlight, no polariser layer. Viewing angle is wide, contrast is high, and they read well in bright rooms. The trade-offs are real: they run warm, draw more current than an equivalent LCD, and the phosphor dims gradually over years of continuous use.

For a home theater PC or a media server with a front panel, the look justifies the setup time. For a general desktop machine you glance at occasionally, the novelty does wear off.

If you disconnect the display, the InpOut driver stays installed. Reconnecting is just a matter of plugging back in — assuming the card ends up in the same slot and the OS assigns it the same I/O address on next boot.

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