Hi.

I have a rather expensive and very useful device programmer/ram/rom emulator thing that connects to the pc via a parallel port. There is no upgrade path short of replacing it at a cost of around £800 to get an equivalent USB connected device, which I'm not going to do. Both because I don't have the spare cash and because it works perfectly anyway.

When I switched my CAD machine to an older shuttle (an SS40G, with only to slots, both PCI) I was annoyed for a while due to the lack of a parallel port, but ended up putting a PCI parallel card in which solved the problem nicely. I have a dual-head nvidia 5200 PCI card in the other slot, and run the machine as a triple-head system using the onboard (slow, but usable) graphics adapter as well. This works very nicely for all my CAD work, and once again I'm reluctant to fiddle with it much, as it works well and is very reliable. Aside from anything else, it would take weeks to reinstall everything on another machine, there's one hell of a lot of special-purpose software on this box.

Here is the problem: I want to add another monitor to the thing, which requires removing the pci parallel adaptor to install another identical 5200 card. This will lose me the parallel port, which breaks the functionality of the system quite severely. I need to figure out a way to avoid this.

There seem to be several options:

1) Don't do it! Stick with the current system and live with a mere 4 linear feet of screen area. Not ideal, as although this seems a lot once I get going I run out of workspace quickly.

2) Switch to a different machine which will allow two graphics cards and still have a parallel port. Possible, but see above argument against.

3) Move the programmer to another machine and network it to the first. Again, entirely possible, but rather self defeating as I then need yet another monitor for this new machine, which means knocking a hole in the wall to extend the workbench to make room, or constantly switching one existing monitor between inputs. Annoying.

4) Buying a different device programmer. Not going to happen. See above.

5) Find some way of getting a USB to parallel adapter that works with devices other than printers.

Option 5 is the favoured one, obviously, but does such a device exist? I can't seem to find one. Know ye of such a beast?

pca

I don't know of a single device, but could you get a parallel to serial converter and then connect the serial to a serial to USB or do those do the same thing as the printer cables?

You could always build one, but then you'd probably spend more than £800 of your time doing it.

Stu

Never tried it or even seen it working but you could look at the Matrox expansion boxes. Look under "Graphics eXpansion Modules (GXMs)" for the DualHead2Go and the TripleHead2Go. They both use an analog input. The digital version of the DualHead2Go has a DVI output.

This might be a little more work than you want but build your own? It looks like there are many technical issues like not being able to precisely control the length of pulses etc... which means you're kinda stuck with the whole USB -> non printer parallel port idea.

The only time I've seen a USB -> parallel port interface dongle that wasn't for a printer was with the old Cypress PSoC parallel port ICE. It didn't emulate a printer however and you downloaded firmware into it to make it run.

How big are your current monitors? 30" might be overkill, but 24's are pretty affordable, and don't require special hardware to run.

Matthew

According to Shuttle the PC8 parallel port expansion is compatible with your SS40G. Meaning you can buy that for £9.36 and then free up the PCI slot for another graphics card.

Though oddly the FS40G motherboard manual doesn't show a connector for it, so it may not work. Only discussion I found on it didn't confirm much, though people say a parallel port from the onboard chipset shows up in Windows. They may have not wired it to anything though.

But the SS40G Spec sheet states a parallell header, so it might still work.

Stig