Parallel port JTAG programmers... under USB?

[GabrielAPetrie]

Hi,

I went to my college laboratory supervisor and asked if they had a JTAG programmer I could check out. He said, "yeah but there's a catch..." and the catch turned out to be twofold: one, sure I can have them if I don't mind please keeping them and two, they're parallel port.

It turns out that JTAG hasn't been used for teaching computer engineering at my college for about two years, now. There is a giant pile of parallel-port JTAG programmers from Digilent sitting around, and I was given three of them to take home.

I'm sitting here wondering how effective these will be if I patch them through a USB-parallel dongle. I would either need to set up a false parallel port mapped to the USB somehow, or would have to use software that expects me to try something like the dongle.

Any solutions out there already existing?

[Cristian.Fatu]

Hello,

Unfortunately most probably you won't be able to use the parallel to JTAG cable with a USB-parallel converter. All of adapters tried by us failed to produced results together with our parallel to JTAG cable. One reason might be that these adapters implement just a "subset" of parallel protocol, sufficient for parallel printers but not for more complex applications like this cable.

The only known (by us) way to use this cable is to acquire a "real" parallel port. Yes, you cans still achieve this by inserting something like this in a desktop computer: http://www.digitus.info/en/products/accessories/interface-cards/pc-interface-cards/seriell-parallel/2-ser-1-par-interface-card-pci-ds-33040/#!prettyPhoto[set]/0/