a busted machine

I wasn't able to follow your instructions, but thank you. I have hooked up my oscilloscope to the parallel port (pin 2) which is connected to x-step and I see bursts of pulses (hooray !).

I had the hal set to 0x4000 but it seems to work with the second port identified by lspci which is 0x4010. The pulses are about 4us wide and I have the BASE_PERIOD set to 10000ns which roughly corresponds to what I see (8us vs 10us).

So I'm convinced I have things in order. 

Or you can use a scope to monitor output p......
Oh good, thank you.