Having problems with TTL on Vista

[mannylee]

Hello everyone, I am a graduate student from Taiwan. My english is not very well (or poor, I think). But I'll try to express my questions clear :)
I've been working on MediaLab to let it synchronize with Biopac MP150 (with UIM100C), but have confronted great troubles.........

Computers bought these years seem not having parellel port at all, so I bought one PCI I/O card (with parallel port) and successfully installed it 7 hours ago. By the way, the OS of my computer is Vista 32-bit.

However, when I downloaded the patched IOTest from this forum and started to test it, in the Port Address field it always showed "LPT1: Error", "LPT2: Error", "LPT3: Error". I've tried to type the decimal values of the port (the hex value is DC00-DC07; D480-D487) and set the byte value and time to 255/50, but there were changes in Monitor field, the value remains 0.

At first, I thought this was the problem of the I/O card, so I went out and bought another one. However, both of them are made with Moschip's chip, so I think they are the same. And result is the same as well (sigh....)

Then, I thought this might be the problem of Vista, so I used the IOTest program on the other computer with XP. The result was a bit of different, this time, Port Address field showed "LPT1 Absent" rather than "LPT1: Error". This was rather convincing, because this computer surely has no parallel ports.

Can anyone gives me some suggestions and hints? Without letting MediaLab synchronize with Biopac, I can not graduate :( .....

Thanks for your watching, hope my extremely poor english didn't make the questions more difficult to understand.

Best regards

[Trevor Newell]

Just an update: Currently awaiting a response back through email.

[mannylee]

Thanks for giving me several helpful tips. However, I still can't get the attached I/O card work, no matter how many cards I change (I've bought 3 kinds of cards already), medialab and IOTest just can't get the card's address (even I enter the decimal values on my own).

Therefore, I decided to set up an whole new computer. It's hard to find a LGA775 socket motherboard with a parallel port, but still I found one. Thank God, medialab and IOTest work perfectly on this computer, it seems like that medialab and IOTest prefer the default port address (888) than the attached I/O card. Maybe it's the operating system's cause (this time I install XP rather than crappy Vista), but I think it's not.

Everything works smoothly since I set up a new computer, I even built one black box to transfer the signals from computer to biopac's I/O channels, this is another story I think.

Thanks for the tips and helps, though the original problems are not really solved :)

As always, please forgive my poor english :-P

[JEC]

Hi,

It turns out that DirectRT has a hard time with hardware addresses which are higher than 32,000.

Hex DC00 ---> Decimal 56,320.

We're working on a fix for this. In the interim, we'd recommend using a computer with a built-in parallel port for optimum reliability.

[jarvis24]

Note that this should no longer be an issue as of v2010 due out this Spring (2010).

[Enrique]

The same problems mannylee reports we face with Windows7. I hope spring 2010 is soon over ;-)