🔌 RC-303 PCI Card with 2X Serial and 1X Parallel Port by Rosewill Review

Works well if you know what you're working with. Do not use the drivers provided on the CD. they are garbage. The drivers should be downloaded directly from the manufacturer as Rosewill paid someone to make the card and then put their name on it. I believe the chip for my card was made by Moschip which has now been bought by ASIX. Spend 4-5 hours getting the Rosewill drivers working and detecting the port, and finally get it working after the first reboot with the Moschip/ASIX drivers.

I have an old CNC router that only has a parallel port. I had to update the software to 64-bit Windows. I install this card in a Win 7 64 box and it works great. Win7-64 Vectric 2D Cut 10.5 and Gravograph IS400.

Place in old Dell computer to make LinuxCNC. The drivers appear to be loaded correctly and work fine with the stepper driver. I've been running everything on the bench for a few hours and everything seems to be working fine. Very happy with this choice.

Modern computers are usually made without parallel ports because modern printers don't need them. But while USB interfaces are useful, they are serial and asynchronous. That's fine if you're doing something like printing and don't care if you stop for a moment or two and wait for the next package as long as it's delayed. However, if you drive very time-sensitive mechanisms, a synchronous interface (e.g. a parallel port) and a real-time kernel are the main requirements. Which brings us to modern

A modern computer usually only has USB ports. I have 2 large format printers that only have a parallel port. I've searched around to find a solution. Most people have said that they use a USB parallel adapter to fix this problem. Also many reviews said it won't work because their drivers are not compatible with all operating systems. These reviews put me off buying a USB to serial adapter. Finally I found another review that said parallel cards might solve the problem. It reminds me of those…