Parallel Port Cards (on the cheap!)

Asking me or ???
I still have some in the shop, can take pictures and post them here, must be 2 or more...

Sorry Tommy, was inquiring if rod has any examples of parallel port cards that are emulated serial cards.
Which seems a bit odd that you'd write an 8 bit value to port , the chip converts it to serial sends it through the chip and then converts it back again to parallel at a IO port.

I know a lot of cards netmos included that use the parport_serial driver, but that seems to probe & setup the card for the parallel port to become available.

I have a few of those and haven't seen any issue with them.

PCI-E is serial comms, so ....
Never used PCI-E to parallel cards, so no idea, but i would think those have issues as it is serial to parallel and need drivers to convert stuff, but some have been reported here to work and some did not work at all, even with supplied drivers.
In general, software emulated cards do not work at all, like usb to parallel, some PCI and PCI-E with a very small chip (usually come with a small CD).
LinuxCNC needs full hardware access to parallel port to work.

Yeah ok granted PCIe is serial comms, little bit higher frequency than your standard serial port.

PCIe parallel port cards are fine. Tested a few of them no issues, sometimes getting the base address is a gamble....and if you move them to a different physical slot they can end up with a different base address.

Motherboard based ports are still the least pain free.......they still exist just need a keen eye and willing to search or go for a dell\hp\or lenovo cos sometimes you'll get lucky.......but then they throw a birck in the work and need the "magic cable" to plug into the MB header, some trickery with the gpio on the "super chip".
In theory if the LPC bus is exposed via a TPM module you could connect a LPC super chip but you would need some process to make it ALIVE. This has been done to get an ISA connector for old sound cards on modern systems, mainly for DOS games.
www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=93291
Same thing on another site that will not be named hackaday.com/2023/03/23/isa-over-tpm-to-your-pc/

Cant do this anymore bye all wrote:

Tested a few of them no issues, sometimes getting the base address is a gamble....and if you move them to a different physical slot they can end up with a different base address.

Same goes for PCI if the BIOS is set to assign resources automatically, it would change port address, but rarely happened in normal use.

rodw, thanks for all your opinions. If I should avoid a card with serial and parallel on the same card- what should I be looking for? I understand I need a parallel port...
Anyway, I have now ordered the following (The other moschip one disappeared!)
www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005573599372.html
I will take my chance at under a tenner