Incorrect information on linuxcnc wiki page

Todd wrote:

The impression I've gotten is that PCIe parallel port card compatibility, is sketchy at best, and the problem is not with (or just with) Linuxcnc. There are sometimes problems with mother board bios and/or kernels that seem to cause all sorts of problems.

There are some cards that are sold as parallel port cards, but they are internally configured as SERIAL ports!
This is what happens when you buy all this stuff from China. The Oxford PCIe chips are multi-I/O, and can do a bunch of stuff such as parallel, serial, game port, etc. which is all configured by a serial EPROM on the card. It will perform the functions as dictated by what was written into that EPROM.

I also ran across another board that uses a chip with a custom (and secret) register layout, and can only be used with their own Windows driver.

Most of the PCIe boards actually work for plain-vanilla parport operation, but there are some issues with some of them when used in the EPP or IEEE-1284 mode. I had to add a command-line option to my driver for the PPMC boards to make the LinuxCNC driver compatible with both styles of EPP protocol.

Jon

We tested a couple CH382 cards here again and they are poorly made. One card had no outputs working, will fix it later.

I started a table of test results for LPT cards: wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Parallel_Port_Cards

Looking back over the issues here with these it might have just been broken cards vs the chip not being compatible. The ch382 cards are still available for under $10 but the QC is poor.