C++ interface to hardware

[mcklsn]

I need to write some code in Visual Studio which interfaces directly with the serial, parallel, and keyboard ports of the PC. I have many years of experience doing this in assembley language in embedded systems, but when I try to understand what the Microsoft C++ programmers have provided to allow me to do this on the PC, I feel like I'm trying to read Sanskrit. I've looked in MSDN and the stuff reminds me of the old IBM manuals we used to get; they were great for reference if you already had an understanding of what you were doing, but if you didn't..... Is there any place I can go to get a basic explanation of the use of the various I/O calls (readfile, writefile, openfile, closefile, etc.) with reference to their use with the hardware and not just disk files? Please help. I feel like I'm drowning.
Thanks for any help you can give.

 

[mingis]

Read the stuff about CreateFile(), WriteFile() and ReadFile() API's. "COM1" or "LPT1" as file names should be used. Dont know about the keyboard. I had to do with it some years ago, as I remember, there are some good techniques like overlapped I/O or something.
You probably could try to write subroutines in assembler as well.