I thought I had responded to this. Like everything else I do lately, I get sidetracked.
I have not been able to get a USB to LPT port adapter to work, and do not think it will.
I suspect something is lost in the translation between USB and a real parallel port.
You can do a lot of tricks with a parallel port sending signals and reversing directions, some of which cannot be replicated through a USB port.
USB ports can only send and receive serial data. Therefore, USB is a much better match for a COM1 port and no signals get lost in the driver.
I also originally used the VM (virtual machine) for XP on Windows 7 Pro, thinking that the 3.58 GCC drivers were too old to work.
That turned out to be untrue. You just have to use 32bit Windows 7, and it can be Home Premium. This works way better than the virtual machine which complicates drivers and messes with memory allocation. The latter is more critical with 32 bit, because you can only address about 3.5GB of RAM with 32 BITS. The drivers were not compiled for 64 bit for the Merc 1 and therefore simply will not work.
One thing that would be nice is if GCC would let go of the specs for the parallel port and some other device information. Then someone could conceivably modify or recompile the drivers. The whole method of only allowing their vendors to distribute drivers and information just does not work well.
Originally Posted by George M. Perzel
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