Extra Parallel port

[cobraman44]

Can anyone tell me what parallel PCI card they are using with XP. I have tried three different ones and none of them will allow for setting I/O address and EPP. The on board port works fine. I have seen several people using multiple parallel ports in one computer and would like to do the same. I have no ISA ports or else I would have one that works.

[stempile]

I had bad luck trying to get those extra PCI cards to work last year. Tried two different ones (don't have any notes on them). Ended up returning them.

One was CompUSA Brand. No dice, the other not sure what it was.

ms

[Rocket]

I recently purchased a USB to parallel port adapter and its no good. XP doesnt assign a LPT port to it. It just shows up in device manager as USB printing support.
Anyone had any success with these?

[wjohn]

Rocket,

While I have personally not tried, I believe that the LPT Port hase to be a phyical port, and not a via USB. My understanding is that it is all to do with how Micro$oft address the hardware and Vixen has to follow suit.

John.

[cobraman44]

The problem is PCI sets everything dynamically. I set Vixen to use this new address and it will send commands to LedTriks but it just goes crazy. I believe that is because I need to set the port to EPP. But there is no options to set anything. What is funny is the NT and DOS drivers have all the options I need.

[A Marchini]

Rocket,

While I have personally not tried, I believe that the LPT Port hase to be a phyical port, and not a via USB. My understanding is that it is all to do with how Micro$oft address the hardware and Vixen has to follow suit.

John.

Vixen uses absolute addressing to control the pins of the LPT directly. A virtual device like a USB LPT would not be accessible in this manner.
If we had parallel to serial converter with an autoclocking element we could use a usb to LPT simply by printing out the values needed to run the shift registers. At this point you might as well use a USB to Serial converter and have a PIC drive the shift stream.

This isn't as easy as it sounds though.

This bad boy would be a nice alternative, however a plugin would need to be designed for it. I imagine that part to be relatively easy (once someone has one in their hands , I mean).
http://www.dlpdesign.com/usb/usb245.shtml

Tony M.

[A Marchini]

Can anyone tell me what parallel PCI card they are using with XP. I have tried three different ones and none of them will allow for setting I/O address and EPP. The on board port works fine. I have seen several people using multiple parallel ports in one computer and would like to do the same. I have no ISA ports or else I would have one that works.

The I/O address for PCI is set by windows. It generally wouldn't want you to relocate them. You should be able to point vixen at it regaurdless.
The EPP is another issue. I am not sure how to work around the mode issue. Usually parallel port mode is handled by configuration of the superI/O chip on the motherboard. In the case of a PCI card, I don't know where the configuration would be. My guess is that a driver handles it, however, I woudn't put it past someone to develop a device that only had one mode.

Tony M.

[Rocket]

Thanks for the info.
Looks like I may need to use a desktop pc if I want to run multiple LPT ports instead of the notebook.

Rocket

[Josh]

Rocket, this might work... http://www.usbgear.com/USBG-LPT-PCM.html

but it is fairly pricey to find out it doesnt work

[cobraman44]

If you use a desktop make sure you have an ISA slot. The PCI LPT ports do not work. I tried 3 different chip sets and none work with XP. I read several articles of people having the same issue with parallel port zip drives.

[A Marchini]

If you use a desktop make sure you have an ISA slot. The PCI LPT ports do not work. I tried 3 different chip sets and none work with XP. I read several articles of people having the same issue with parallel port zip drives.

I was curious if you tried a card like this?
http://www.kanda.com/index.php3?bc=direct&bw=%2Fproducts%2FMisc%2FPCI-LPT.html

A lot of cards I see use the ITE chip and it only is one mode only. Something makes me think they may have screwed something else up along the way (however, now I am thinking the thing they screwed up may be voltage, PCI slots these days are 3V, perhaps the cards have insufficient drive voltage).
Anyways, the cards based on the NM9835 may be more configurable an likely to function as required.

Tony M.

[cobraman44]

That board is based on the NetMos chip. I tried one of those as well. All the boards I tried had the hardware capabilities. It was the drivers that was the issue. The drivers for NT and Dos would allow you to make the proper selections. Drivers for XP, 2000, 2003 would not not. What I have read is that it is the way the driver has to interact with the OS.

[jstlucas]

That board is based on the NetMos chip. I tried one of those as well. All the boards I tried had the hardware capabilities. It was the drivers that was the issue. The drivers for NT and Dos would allow you to make the proper selections. Drivers for XP, 2000, 2003 would not not. What I have read is that it is the way the driver has to interact with the OS.

Anyone ever have any luck, then, with adding another parallel port pci card? I ordered one, installed it, and then found it worked, kindof, THEN read about all the problems w. getting it to work. Yeah, mine has the netmos 9835 chip also.

[Photovor]

Vixen accesses the parallel port via the inpout32.dll. It's this which is the problem. Inpout32.dll can only deal with 16-bit I/O addresses, which means 0x0000 through 0xFFFF. Your PCI add-in cards use a 32-bit address space. ONLY if you can get these cards to use an address in the range above, will they work.

If you had an ISA LPT add-in card, you'd have no problem. I had a PC once that I had the motherboard LPT port, and 2 ISA add-in cards, and it was very easy to program it for the ports, because they all were in the correct address range.

As for USB to printer port converters, forget that as well.

Time to pull those old PCs out of the closet.

[A Marchini]

Anyone ever have any luck, then, with adding another parallel port pci card? I ordered one, installed it, and then found it worked, kindof, THEN read about all the problems w. getting it to work. Yeah, mine has the netmos 9835 chip also.

If the board supports I/O cycles then it can be accessed in the 16 bit I/O space. It may work if the I/O driver is executed without the PCI card driver installed. Of course... the tough part there is getting windows to tell you where the card is.
Windows may block I/O access to it even with the I/O driver in the parallel port plugin.

One thing to look at in the driver (unfortunately I don't have a card to check this) is to look in the driver tab, see if there is some kind of "legacy" check mark that may bring this card into the standard LPT card areas like 378,3BC,278.

I should just buy a card and try it. It seems the inpout32.dll appears to be able to take 16 bit i/O addresses without a problem.

Tony M.

P.S. What does "worked , kind of" mean??

[jstlucas]

P.S. What does "worked , kind of" mean??

"worked, kind of" means that if I used Vixen 1.1, simple 595 plug-in instead of the olsen 595 plugin, and set the "number of clock cycles to hold high" to 2 (instead of 1), it ran the 595 perfectly with the pci parallel port card. However, Vixen 2 doesn't have this option to output multiple clock cycle highs like 1.1 did and I'd prefer to program in vixen 2 for Christmas 2009. (Hey, put that clock cycle option BACK IN!!!). Besides, the simple-595 only runs one parallel port, the olsen 595 will run multiple parallels.

Now, I'm also sending channels 129 through 192 out through a quad differential line driver at the output of my 2nd 595 board through a few hundred ft of cable to a receiver circuit to drive my neighbor's house, and the extra clock cycles just mess up that display horribly, can't get consistent results at all.

So, maybe having the olsen 595 plugin have the capability for the different ports to hold multiple clock cycles high might fix the problem, one 595 through LPT1 could have a single clock cycle high, the pci parallel port card version LPT2 could have 2 high clock cycles.

[A Marchini]

"worked, kind of" means that if I used Vixen 1.1, simple 595 plug-in instead of the olsen 595 plugin, and set the "number of clock cycles to hold high" to 2 (instead of 1), it ran the 595 perfectly with the pci parallel port card. However, Vixen 2 doesn't have this option to output multiple clock cycle highs like 1.1 did and I'd prefer to program in vixen 2 for Christmas 2009. (Hey, put that clock cycle option BACK IN!!!). Besides, the simple-595 only runs one parallel port, the olsen 595 will run multiple parallels.

Now, I'm also sending channels 129 through 192 out through a quad differential line driver at the output of my 2nd 595 board through a few hundred ft of cable to a receiver circuit to drive my neighbor's house, and the extra clock cycles just mess up that display horribly, can't get consistent results at all.

So, maybe having the olsen 595 plugin have the capability for the different ports to hold multiple clock cycles high might fix the problem, one 595 through LPT1 could have a single clock cycle high, the pci parallel port card version LPT2 could have 2 high clock cycles.

OK cool. So it did work, you just need to slow the cycles down, that is understandable. I will have to check the PCI spec but perhaps I/O cycles on the PCI bus are slightly faster than the LPC bus.

Anyways, I don't think it is any major deal to get the option back in the driver. I will try to look at it tonight and post. The 595 driver is relatively easy.

Tony M.

[jstlucas]

OK cool. So it did work, you just need to slow the cycles down, that is understandable. I will have to check the PCI spec but perhaps I/O cycles on the PCI bus are slightly faster than the LPC bus.

Anyways, I don't think it is any major deal to get the option back in the driver. I will try to look at it tonight and post. The 595 driver is relatively easy.

Tony M.

I GOT IT WORKING!!!

Thinking that the problem might be with the output of the pci parallel port card not having enough "ooommmppphhh" to drive a ton of chips, I added a couple of inverter chips (7404 variety, not the 74hc14 but close enough) to drive the three signals and the 2nd parallel port drives 192 olsen channels PERFECTLY!!! So, a combination of extended clock pulses and a signal driver is what it took me to get the extra pci parallel port going.

Oh happy days... Now to get KC to post a clock pulse extender for Vixen 2.

[Virtus]

I used one off TigerDirect a couple years ago that was a two port PCI and while the ports were not re-addressable I was able to tell Vixen to address them on base addresses 1060h and 1050h, respectively. I think it was sold as STARTECH brand.

[A Marchini]

I GOT IT WORKING!!!

Thinking that the problem might be with the output of the pci parallel port card not having enough "ooommmppphhh" to drive a ton of chips, I added a couple of inverter chips (7404 variety, not the 74hc14 but close enough) to drive the three signals and the 2nd parallel port drives 192 olsen channels PERFECTLY!!! So, a combination of extended clock pulses and a signal driver is what it took me to get the extra pci parallel port going.

Oh happy days... Now to get KC to post a clock pulse extender for Vixen 2.
The 74hc14 was just to eliminate any potential slow rise signal problems, but it seems all you needed was a buffer which is always a good idea anyways.
The big issue is driving all those clocks and latch lines at one time, that could be a lot of fan out to work correctly.

It is great that you got it working.
Tony M.