If you've purchased a new computer in the past few years, there's a decent chance that the legacy ports (serial, parallel & joystick) have been replaced by USB ports.

While the USB bus is a powerful way to send lots of data back and forth between a computer and multiple peripherals, it's not as hacker-friendly as the legacy ports were.

At the time of this writing, DirectRT will only work with ports having a physical (and electrical) address inside the computer. So USB-Serial and USB-Parallel adapters are out.

That being said, we're working on some modifications to make DirectRT work with emulated serial ports. But we're not ready to go public with the new code yet. Soon, though!

However, companies such as www.jameco.com sell 'Parallel Interface Cards' which connect to your computer's internal expansion slots. Voila - a 'real' parallel port that DirectRT can talk with. Check out their part #171927 for reference.

They also sell serial interface cards. #171362 looks promising.

USB-parallel ports adapters will never work with DirectRT or MediaLab.

They're useful if you need to bring an old printer back to life, but not for much else. Windows, unfortunately, restricts their functionality to driving printers only. It's not possible to toggle individual data pins back and forth like you can with a standard parallel port.

MediaLab, however, can send and receive data through a generic USB-Serial interface. At $40 or so, these interfaces emulate a regular COM port and allow your new computer to communicate with legacy peripherals.

If you dig a bit deeper in this hardware forum, you'll find a sample MediaLab script which works well with an emulated serial port.

So the short answer is this: if you need serial capability, MediaLab will work with regular serial ports as well as USB emulated ones. DirectRT will work with regular serial ports, and *soon* will work with emulated ports.

If you need a parallel port and your computer doesn't have one, consider switching machines or (if possible) buying a third-party parallel port card.

By the way, these cards are great for general hacking. Because if you make a mistake and blow one up, you're out $40 - which is better than replacing an entire motherboard.

If you get that far, let us know and we'll walk you through the process so your experiments will run properly.

-John