Hey,
Sorry if this is not the appropriate forum for this topic, I looked at all the forum sub-sections and this one seemed the best fit.
About a month and a half ago we bought an old Bridgeport Boss with a CNC retrofit. There are 3 boards (Larken Cobra Stepper Motor Drivers) for X, Y, Z. We have everything on this side wired fine, and have all the documentation for the boards. They need a minimum of 4us steps, we're using Mach3's default of 5us at the moment so that should be okay.
The original retrofit used an old version of TurboCNC on an even older MS-DOS system, we got a computer here with a clean install of Windows 7 SP1 32-Bit, and Mach3 demo. (We are going to purchase Mach3 as soon as we can jog our steppers on the demo). Because this computer doesn't have an onboard parallel port, we purchased a PCI-Express card with the AX99100 chipset, drivers are installed and it appears as LPT1 under 0x3010, I verified this in Device Manager and using Parallel Port Tester, a piece of freeware I found while I was troubleshooting this issue.
The problem I run into is once I plug my breakout board into the parallel port on the computer, it appears as those all 3 boards are trying to be driven at the same time, but not enough to turn the motors. You can hear a slight whine from them while it's plugged in with no movement. As well, the moment I plug it in or take it out of the computer, all 3 motors step a single time.
I have X step wired to pin 2, dir to pin 3, Y step to 4, dir to 5, and Z step to 6, dir to 7. This is reflected in the "Ports and Pins" configuration of Mach3 as well. Port #1 is 0x3010, I also set Port # for Step/Dir ActiveLo to 1. I enabled ActiveLo for both as I believe this is what the boards need, but I have tried every combination of Step/Dir ActiveLo being On/Off, and the issue is the same everytime.
I believe the issue may be the PCI card I am using, but I am not 100%. Any help would be greatly appreciated, I have been working on this daily for a week or two now.