Support for legacy test equipment on newer PC's?

ajcrm125

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Well I knew this day would come... work just gave me a new Win7 machine and neither it nor the docking station have a parallel port. Anyone know if the USB to Parallel adapters out there will work with test equipment? I use mainly Data I/O products (Unisite, Labsite, etc).
 
Desktop or notebook?

If Desktop> what model mobo?

If Notebook> sell it.

EDIT: nevermind, I see it's a laptop. Can you get a docking station with a PCI slot?
 
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I've never had much luck with usb-to-parallel adapters and legacy equipment. Every adapter I've seen has a funny USB driver dedicated for printing, not to simulate direct hardware access. Give it a shot but I'd recommend you keep an old junker PC dedicated for this task.

However, I wanted to mention a piece of software called Direct I/O (link) that lets old software access hardware directly, even on newer versions of windows. It lets me use my ISA eprom burner fine on XP; ordinarily I'd be stuck with 98 or DOS only.
 
Alternatively, you could keep the notebook you got, and just use it at your workbench for web browsing and the forums and such. Then, you could set up a 2nd laptop that's dedicated to just the test equipment.

I have several laptops (I'm in IT repair) that I have sitting around with no home. I won't sell them to you for $$, but perhaps we could barter a trade? Ninty repair in exchange for a Pentium 4 laptop with Parallel port? PM me if interested.
 
I've never had luck with the USB to Parallel Port adapters. Luckily, I have found some PCI ones that work though.
 
I keep an old desktop tower for only doing roms and nothing else as my Needham's pb10 needs an isa slot for the card.
 
Never found anything consistently reliable and I ended up upgrading all of my Altera, Atmel, Xilinx, etc tools to USB. For the Data I/O I have an older headless workstation running XP/Linux which has the legacy 25 pin serial and parallel ports that I manage over RDP/X.

If you want to cover shipping I'll be happy to send you a little Dell or HP workstation you can use to keep the legacy stuff working.
 
FWIW - I have had pretty good luck on some customer equipment using this:

http://www.walmart.com/ip/Cables-To-Go-USB-to-DB25-IEEE-1284-Parallel-Printer-Adapter-Cable/15172637

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My customers were not using programmers etc.. however they were controlling some CNC machines and plotters. The driver creates a device "USBLPT1" so as long as you can specify the port to use, it should work.

That said, most of the laptops that I sell that support docks (through a real dock, not the USB dock crap) have a parallel port. It does depend on the dock you buy as HP in particular has a few dock models.
 
I have a "newer" Celeron HP business notebook with docking station running XP and it has a parallel port. The nice thing about that setup is I can undock the notebook and take it with me to a friend's house and it has all of my rom images, repair notes, data sheets, manuals, etc. Runs my Data I/O,etc. and runs fast enough to surf the web for arcade related stuff and check emails.

Bill
 
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I have an "newer" Celeron HP business notebook with docking station running XP and it has a parallel port. The nice thing about that setup is I can undock the notebook and take it with me to a friend's house and it has all of my rom images, repair notes, data sheets, manuals, etc. Runs my Data I/O,etc. and runs fast enough to surf the web for arcade related stuff and check emails.

Bill

That's exactly what I have now and why I'd like to keep that setup.
I wonder if something like this would work:
606642f18aa16d6a1c546a6018b35648_300.gif


I see them on Ebay for < $20
 
I have a pciexpress serial port card in my win7 machine that works great with my Data I/O.

Which data I/O ?

The problem with my Data i/o 29b is running the DOS software, not accessing the serial port...
 
That's exactly what I have now and why I'd like to keep that setup.
I wonder if something like this would work:
606642f18aa16d6a1c546a6018b35648_300.gif


I see them on Ebay for < $20

It's still not a "true" parallel port so the driver you would need to install will still emulate one. The major difference with internal PCI / PCI-E cards compared to the USB and PCMCIA you are actually adding a LTP port and the associated chip onto the BUS so it becomes a true LTP port.

The ExpressCard which is commonly found on newer notebooks is actually a combination of USB and PCIe and again similar to that of the USB where you are emulating a LTP port.

If the notebook has a true PCMCIA/Cardbus slot.. this particular card would have better chances at working than not, but again would not be a guarantee.

-

On a sidenote, the USB parallel adapter I linked earlier in the thread is a bi-directional parallel adapter which is why my customers most likely have been able to use it with their machinery. Additionally, you may be able to change the port assignment through windows and set it as LPT1
 
Which data I/O ?

The problem with my Data i/o 29b is running the DOS software, not accessing the serial port...

29B with Unipak 2B. Im running the newest version of promlink that works in windows. You might have to adjust the dials on the data IO to match your port settings. You also have to have the correct cable. I made mine using a pinout I found on the net.
 
Looks like the new laptop has ExpressCard and not PCMCIA so I'll prob go with this guy:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=470938631&pf_rd_i=507846

2x serial parts and 1x parallel port:
4114wN7ABdL._SL500_AA300_.jpg


It says its a PCI-e based true Parallel port (not usb emulated) so I'm hpoing it will work. I'll let you know how I make out...

Just a FYI, ExpressCard is designed around a combination of USB and PCI-e... There is some iteration of the USB spec at the heart of the devices. That's what I meant in my first post.
 
29B with Unipak 2B. Im running the newest version of promlink that works in windows. You might have to adjust the dials on the data IO to match your port settings. You also have to have the correct cable. I made mine using a pinout I found on the net.


This site will give you everthing you need to know about runnig a Data I/O with windows (patched version) and also upgrades and how to make the serial cable. On my XP notebook, when I run promlink, I get an error that the 2nd serial port can't be found (docking station does not have a second one). Just click "ignore" and you are running promlnk.

http://www.retroclinic.com/leopardcats/dio/dataio29b.htm

Bill
 
+1 to what Mrbill said. I used the same site for the info on building my cable. I also get that warning when starting promlink and click ignore.
 
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