Machsupport Forum
Mach Discussion => General Mach Discussion => Topic started by: avongil on June 01, 2009, 07:19:05 PM
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Hi All,
I'm having trouble setting up my second parallel port card. It is a StarTech PCI1P_LP
Mach3 wont work with it at all, there is no signal to the charge pump on it and im dead in the water. I have Two gecko 540s. One is working great, its plugged into the onboard port. The other I cannot seem to get running.
I searched and searched, installed the drivers from the netmos site, tripple checked my base adresses etc..
What can I do? Is there a known working card I can buy? I dont care if it costs over 100$, I need something that works.
Al
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I posted a card that work with Mach a little while back including info on drivers, etc.
Just look back for the obvious thread title.
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I spent an entire day troubleshooting the card. I'm convinced its a bug in Mach3 that does not let it adress high port numbers.
I replaced it with a 15$ ITE 887x chipset card and had it working in 3 minutes.
Thanks.
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What was the address of the card?
Hood
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I spent an entire day troubleshooting the card. I'm convinced its a bug in Mach3 that does not let it adress high port numbers.
I replaced it with a 15$ ITT chipset card and had it working in 3 minutes.
Thanks.
If I'm not mistaken, some of these parallel port cards are not actual "Legacy" type cards and are more like special adapters and need special drivers to work, not the legacy drivers to use for a standard parallel port.
Did the Startech card have it's own drivers that you had to use?
Dave
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I searched and searched, installed the drivers from the netmos site, tripple checked my base adresses etc..
What can I do? Is there a known working card I can buy? I dont care if it costs over 100$, I need something that works.
If you have to install drivers, like you mentioned above, then the card will not work. Having to install drivers means that the card is emulating a parallel port for printing purposes. There is no direct set of ports for Mach to talk to. It seems that finding a compatible PCI parallel port can can be a hit or miss proposition. I do recall seeing a few posts where folks have mentioned cards that worked for them. It might be worth a search.
I recommend folks skip the hassle and use a SmoothStepper. It does 99% of everything the LPT driver does and does it faster and smoother, and has two full ports built in. I've not sold one yet and had a customer disappointed with it.
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The Rosewill card I am using has a driver associated with the chipset. Interestignly, the driver that came with the card does not work with MACH, but the driver from the chipest manuf site (MOSchip or something like that) works fine.
I posted that the physical port on the card was the second port and that the pigtail port was the first com port, but I have since learned that it is actually random. Either can be either, so you have to just try both addresses and see which one works.
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The ITT 877 card has a driver that i used. It works great.
The port number on the netmos card was something like EC8F.
Both cards on the packaging claim they are legacy cards.
I don't buy the driver answer. All cards have drivers, some are just pre-loaded into windows Xp..
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Some cards do not have the same HW layout as legacy parallel ports. Their drivers create a virtual parallel port, much like a USB to parallel adapter. These types of cards will not work just like the USB to parallel adapters won't work.
You can choose to not believe it if you wish, but that information is direct from the guy who wrote Mach's parallel port driver. I suspect he would know. ;)
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Both cards on the packaging claim they are legacy cards.
They can "say" whatever they'd like you to believe but they only "look" legacy. 8)
Dave
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samething happend to me 2 years back with netmos card. the process to make it work went like this. afer install you find the card is recognized by windows but mach3 cant see it. shut down windows cold. start back up. uninstall all
printer and sound drivers. shutdown cold. start back up in safe mode. check to see if windows found and installed all the drivers back, it might miss the netmos,if it does ,install netmos again while in safe mode.when all the drivers
are recognized. shut down then restart not reboot. mach3 should now recognize the port address. if not move the card to another slot away from pci-1 slot.
bill
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It's very frustrating trying to find a card that works. I suggest starting a card database, so people don't waste their time. I really don't know where to even get a so called legacy card, all cards sold today are modern multifunction I/0 cards (you install the driver, then it installs a second or third driver.). Even though you claim they wont work, there is conflicting evidence that many do., such as my ITE 887x chipset generic card.
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I have to agree that needing a driver does not mean it will not work with Mach, I have some MRi cards that require a driver as XP does not recognise them natively but they work fine once the driver is installed, I think they are MosChip.
Hood
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That's true Hood, I was not very clear in my initial response. I should have mentioned looking for the virtual ports in Device manager as a clue.
You can also have issues with the motherboard not supporting using a parallel port as Mach does, even a 'good' add-on PCI will work. (But the driver test will look good!)
That is why I'm a big SmoothStepper cheerleader. (Did that give you a strange mental picture? :P )
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That is why I'm a big SmoothStepper cheerleader. (Did that give you a strange mental picture? :P )
Thankfully it didnt ;D
Hood
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All I know is that in the "old" days you just used the supplied driver and all worked. I had a heck of a time with my Dell, the fourth card worked and the driver that came with it didn't work. Someone, out of nowhere, from one of the forums, e-mailed me a driver and it was up and working in 5 mniutes.
Ok, that Rockwell card, three hits with a hammer and to the trash can she went. Should have bought beer with
the $15.00 bucks. But it did satisfy my thirst for hitting something! Who's knows these days with all the different computers hiting the market, cards on ebay....., drivers that don't work, you just never know.
RICH