Paralell port mode: AT, PS2, EPP, ECP, DMA...?

Morning all, can anyone here tell which is the "preferred" mode to set your parallel port for best results?
My BIOS (Dell Optiplex 760) offers the following:

AT, PS/2, EPP, ECP no DMA, ECP DMA1, ECP DMA2

Ordinarily I'd assume ECP+DMA would be "best" but that's for data transfer, not accurately timed pulses, so can anyone point me the right way?

I think the best choice depends on what you are connecting to it.
For normal breakout board connections, I thing the best choice is usually the PS/2 (or Bidrictional, or SPP they are all the same) setting.

If you are using a Mesa card or Pico, then you have to use EPP.

That said many parallel port hardware implementations are slightly messed up. Which setting is chosen can (sometimes) make a difference in things such as which pins can be used as inputs or outputs and whether certain pins are pulled high or low (for example X-mode usually only works with the PS/2 setting). So try all and which ever works best for your hardware is the one to use. Of course they could all work equally well, and then it doesn't matter.