WTB: Parallel Port Cable

A male to male that works on a V64jr 512mbit. I bought one but it didn't work. I'm sure my V64jr works, though, since it boots the cart in the back.:redface:

 

I don't have one to sell you, but I can tell you what to look for when buying one. You need a cable that makes all the connections a lot of parallel port cables don't because they're specifically made for printers, so they won't work for other purposes. The cable you need will be pretty fat, like a centimeter or more in diameter. And it probably won't be marked as a "printer cable," but as a "DB25 parallel cable." Another thing to consider is that the cable shouldn't be too long, I guess the signal degrades if the cable is too long and the signal can drop out. Try to keep it under three feet. Lastly, you might just need to change the protocol of your parallel port in your system's BIOS control panel. It can be either bi-directional, ECP or EPP; I think ECP is what Bung recommends, but mine work even though it's set to bi-directional, so it must depend on some other things, too. Try changing to ECP if it's not already set that way, though.

One more thing, the fact that you can play the game plugged into the the back certainly doesn't mean that the unit works fully as a flash cart. Your problem could easily be with the cable, though, because I know a lot of people have had trouble getting the right parallel cables for their flash carts.


...word is bondage...

 

Everything you've said is correct, except one small detail I should correct you on. The reason the cable must be short is not signal attenuation (i.e. the resistance of the wire over a long distance causes the signal strength to decrease) as you seemed to be implying, but because of the nature of paralell data transmission. Consider this
8 bits:
00101010
then another 8 bits, sent one clock cycle later
10100101

so the first 8 are sent down the paralell cable simultaneously. For a short distance this is fine, but when travelliing further, the chances that the bits become out of sync is increased, therefore leading to you receiving garbage on the receiving end, where two signals become out of sync with the clock and end up mixing. This is why parallel cables are generally only used for short data transmission, because although they are uber fast, keeping the bits in sync is tricky. Its the reason on motherboards you sometimes see wiggly lines on the traces - this is so that one piece of datas distance to travel is compensated for leading to the bits arriving in sync. This problem doesn't affect serial transmission, as that is of course sent 1 bit at a time - so there are no other bits for it to get out of sync with

 

Thanks guys So, would this:
http://www.computercablestore.com/detail.aspx?ID=336
be fine? I know it's long, but it is not labled as a printer cable (directly).

 

15 feet seems pretty long to me. I don't really know at what length you start to have problems, though. I found a 3 foot cable at a thrift store when I got my first back-up unit (Neo Geo Pocket) and I always used that and never had any trouble. That's the only reason I recommended keeping it at or under 3 feet. Maybe 6, 10 or even 15 are okay. If you look around, you'll find a shorter one, though, so I wouldn't recommend getting the one you posted the link to.

Try eBay maybe:

http://cgi.ebay.com/2-5-FT-PARALLEL...ryZ51284QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

Thanks for the info about what exactly the prob;lem with long parallel cables is, steadster, I never really knew for sure, I've just seen a lot of people who's problems were solved by getting a shorter cable for their back-up device. Maybe you know the answer to the question of how long is too long as well?


...word is bondage...