Subj : Making a Parallel Port Laplink cable
To   : Mindsurfer
From : Bob Worm
Date : Sun Aug 10 2025 22:42:24

  Re: Making a Parallel Port Laplink cable
  By: Mindsurfer to kirkspragg on Sun Aug 10 2025 14:17:08

 >  ki> stuff from my main PC to my retro PC sitting on another desk using a
 >  ki> parallel port laplink cable.

 > Sorry, can't help with that, but wanted to mention that i remember using
 > laplink cable to transfer data via norton commander. that was so fast
 > compared to a serial nullmodem cable. good times =)

Oh, yeah - I have such fond memories of Laplink Pro. The parallel cable was sooo much faster than serial and I always wondered why *anyone* would use serial. I'm not sure if you could do the bootstrap procedure (where you used some DOS commands to receive a copy of Laplink to a computer which didn't have it) over parallel, though? Maybe that was the difference.

Out of interest does anyone know if there's a protocol spec available for Laplink? I only have software on the Acorn computer I'm using to post this message because it was really easy to write software that used the serial port to receive files. At the time the serial Tx didn't work so it needed something custom... but now it's fixed I'd love to make that Laplink compatible. Though I'd need to translate the file names as Acorn uses "." as a directory separator (e.g. "ADFS::0.$" is the root of floppy drive 0. Inside that I could have a "Docs" directory with MyFile inside it which would be "$.Docs.MyFile") - there are no file extensions in RiscOS, instead using a file type attribute, so when importing DOS files it's customary to replace the . with a / - e.g. README/TXT.

BobW
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