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  #1  
Old 08-17-2017, 07:21 PM
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rosko_racer rosko_racer is offline
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Default ALPS Old Printer Port to USB

Calling all owners of ALPS printers with parallel printer port!

I have an ALPS MD1000 with the old parallel printer port. I need to use it for my upscale EAC Firecat. Well, during a recent garage cleanup I decided to throw away two working XP computers that had the parallel printer port, not thinking of using at least one for the ALPS... daahhh!!!

A quick search in Amazon came back with cables that will connect the parallel printer cable to a USB.

Question: Have anyone used this cable adapter successfully?

R_R
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Old 08-18-2017, 09:36 AM
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I think I have one you can use Raul, if it survived La gran purga.

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Old 08-18-2017, 04:21 PM
scigs30 scigs30 is offline
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You can do a search on the Alps Yahoo groups, tons of good info.
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Old 08-18-2017, 09:38 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by scigs30
You can do a search on the Alps Yahoo groups, tons of good info.


I am a member of those groups but it has been such a long time since I last visited them that I had completely forgotten about them... will check them out this weekend to see what I can learn.

KJ - Thanks for the offer! I see that what I did in my garage was called "la gran purga"... that time I thew away old stereo equipment, computer parts, and other stuff no longer needed or not in working condition... Tomorrow I will pick up an old XP computer from church and see if it would work the Alps.
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Old 08-20-2017, 07:04 PM
aeppel_cpm aeppel_cpm is offline
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I might have a parallel port card (for a modern motherboard slot) around here somewhere. Unless I 5S'd it.
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Old 08-20-2017, 07:49 PM
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Thanks everyone for your help.

I did purchased a parallel to USB bidirectional cable online. I installed the drivers and then connected the printer. When I turned the printer on it would cycle through the on and off sequence and would not stop. At one point I disconnected the cable from the USB port while the printer was cycling and it stopped doing it. I will continue to check later on the forums as I am interested in connecting the ALPS for my newer PC. In the meantime I got an old pc with a parallel port I can use to print my decals for now.
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Old 08-21-2017, 09:29 PM
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Don't have much experience with USB-to-parallel adaptors, but the USB-to-serial cables could get fiddly at times. They work OK -- except when there is a hiccup, and you find out that what used to hook up as COM2 is now COM3, which then becomes COM4 on subsequent boot (and usually it continues to "walk" with subsequent boots). The fix is to go into Device Manager, enable viewing of Hidden Devices (in Win10 it's easier -- previous version of Windows will you to first enable this feature by creating the environment variable "devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices" environment variable to value of 1 to enable viewing of hidden devices), then delete the failed instances of the device driver. I've run into similar sort of problem with USB modems. Main issue I see is the inherent "plug-and-play" nature of USB devices, which typically load after user signon (rather than system boot-up) -- making them susceptible to an occasional hiccup. The serial and parallel I/O card gernerally don't have this sort of problem, since the device instantiation takes place at a much earlier stage (typically it's detected very early -- often at the BIOS level first, then the OS will think it's a built-in device rather than a plug-and-play device that could get disconnected at runtime).

Unfortunately.... there is yet another spanner that could be thrown into the works. In Windows, device drivers need to match the "bit-ness" of the base OS. Chances are, the device driver for that printer (especially one that uses parallel port) is likely to be 32-bit, which means it probably only works properly in a 32-bit version of Windows. If your computer is relatively new, then it's probably going to be running 64-bit version of Windows. You may or may not be able find a driver for the printer that is 64-bit.

On the other hand, at least we're talking about a printer. With Windows OS past XP, only printers are supported on the parallel port -- so if you try to plug in an external drive to such a port, or a scanner, you *may* be out of luck in a more recent version of Windows. Probably the mot problematic would be the use of "dongle" that plug into serial or parallel port ("dongles" at one time were often used as a hardware-based copy-protection method. On the upside, transferring license to another machine is is as easy as moving the dongle from one computer to another. Downside is they sometimes didn't work properly in "passthru" mode when you hung devices off these).
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