Gerry, thank you for contradicting me.
What I miss, is the pathway to tell Mach 3 to use the resources provided by the three additional ports not offered in the main config menu.
It is clear that two LPT like ports can be directly configured, less so (for me) for any other one.
Is it sufficient to define a sole port number that differs from the two used in the main config menu ? This is not obvious from the documentation that is available to me.
If for example I assign ports 1 and 2 in the main config, I could be using implicitly ports 3, 4 and 5 (in the pins menu) to get access to all the other resources ?
cheers, Philippe