Lavasoft dual parrallel port not working with Smartie

[vulcan4d]

Hey guys. I got two HD44780 4x20 LCD's that I custome installed into my PC case. I purchased a lavasoft dual parralel port pci card to run these LCD's. These ports check out working fine with my printer, however they do not work with my LCD's. Only the motherboard's parallel port works with the LCD. I would like to have both lcd's running and I suspect it's a 2 way communication problem. I'm not parallel port expert but like the motherboard LPT port it has options, EPP, ECP etc I'm guessing the lavasoft are single directional (SPP if I'm not mistaken). What do you guys think? Could this be the problem, any suggestions? Thanks.

[mattcro]

Smartie and the LCDs should work with even the oldest standard parallel port - EPP/ECP etc is not strictly required, and SPP should work.

The problem may be the non-standard addresses that PCI card ports use. What are you currently using as the port settings in Smartie?

To find the actual port addresses, look in My Computer -> Properties -> Hardware -> Device Manager (may be in a different place depending on Windows version) and look for parallel ports. Look on the Resources tab for the two ports and note the address (I/O Range) - it'll look something like 9C00, or A800 or similar.

Put that number into Smartie's port settings in the form $9C00 and that will hopefully get the LCDs working.

If you want two LCDs running under Smartie, you'll need to have two separate copies of Smartie running, eg installed into separate folders with their own config files. I think you can also specify which config (ini) file to use, so you could have one installation of Smartie with two config files.

[uzumaki]

My parallel port card used $D800 for the port. And it had 3 different port address listed. The easiest way to find the right port is to look for one that has only 8 bytes range.