MaxCoderz

You could always try to find a usb cable on EBAY, you'll just have to make sure the seller will ship overseas(not sure how much shipping would cost either ).

eBay seems to be the only option, aye. Even then they usually ship from the USA, adding a hefty P&P charge.

I found out why TiLP couldn't see my serial cable, though - hard coded COM port base addresses. I opened the libticables2-1.dll and replaced all instances of 0x000002F8 (legacy COM2) with 0x0000CCD0 (my actual COM2) and the BBC BASIC app installed first time. I'm not going to tempt fate and try again for a while, but at the moment I'm cheerful.

That's still more luck than I've had(with TILP). I can't ever seem to get it to work right. I have an old parallel cable (gray) and a black one and I can't seem to get either of them to work with TILP (or anyhing else for that matter). The problem is TIconnect doesn't like alot of older programs and it likes to crash and give an invalid file error. I tried to use alternative linking programs, but none of the alternatives seem to like my old parallel cables. Either that or the com port on my laptop is borked. XD

If the cable does not work try taking two pieces of wire and bypassing the two resistors (so parallel port pin 13 goes directly to the tip and pin 12 goes directly to the the ring - no resistors between the link port and the TI).

I cannot accept any responsibility for damaged calculators or parallel ports, of course, but my cable contains no resistors and "works" with TiLP. With the resistors in place it the parallel port cannot hold the calculator's data lines low. I also had to patch the TiLP binaries to work with my parallel port's base address (0x0000CCD8 instead of 0x00000378).

I tried TI Connect on two other machines (one running Windows XP and the other running Windows 2000) to see if it was one of those fabled "Vista bugs". Same result on those machines; the software detects a cable on the COM port then hangs. The same cable works beautifully with FastLink and (after patching) with TiLP.

Tried "Userport" yet?

There are a number of means of accessing I/O ports directly under NT (even the old TI-GRAPHLINK software uses a proper driver to access the ports instead of trying to access them directly). PortTalk.sys (AllowIO) was the one I was aware of. The usual problem these days are hard-coded port addresses. If the software uses an external DLL to access the port you can sometimes write your own DLL that redirects port writes but this doesn't always help.

As accessing the port requires the installation of a kernel-mode driver you must run the application with administrative privileges, of course.

TiLP's problem is not access to the port - it can do that fine - it's that it uses hard-coded legacy port addresses. These are usually only available if your motherboard has the ports built-in or you use an ISA card. PCI cards will get assigned whichever port address Windows thinks is appropriate.

That said, even Microsoft Virtual PC doesn't support parallel ports at any other address than the legacy 0x378, even though it used to when it was Connectix Virtual PC.

Hm... I've never had a problem with sending Apps to my 84+. However, TiLP fails every time when sending a picture. Is there any way to send pictures to the calculator with TiLP, or does it just not support that feature?