CAUTION HERE: any such cable would have to have a female parallel connector for the existing cable to connect to, just like the one on the back of the computer, NOT a parallel connector designed to connect to the printer!

http://www.beyondlogic.org/porttalk/porttalk.htm

I've just managed to get the extremely dodgy Visual Basic Sony ICD-R100 software to work under Windows XP for the first time, thanks to the piece of software linked to above... The procedure is

a) Install the dodgy software, using XP compatibility mode
b) Set up the icd-pclink.exe to run under XP compatibility mode
c) Use the allowio.exe from the porttalk package to give the dodgy Sony software access to the parallel port:

c:\> allowio.exe icd-pclink.exe \a

It is shameful that Sony haven't rewritten this software to use the NT/2000 HAL. It'd just be a case of tweaking the Visual Basic source a very little bit - lazy so&so's... or perhaps they want to sell some of their new ICDs?

Perhaps this might work?

http://www.coolgear.com/images/336581pro.jpg

I found it here.

Anything for my sister-in-law

I have just now finished (successfully) the installation of ICD-R100PC's software. Just for others to know, I have overcome several problems some of which I found solutions for in this forum (thanks). Just to summarise, the steps to perform the installation for Windows XP are the following:

1) Install the Sony's software (ICD-PCLINK). This should be done in Windows 95 or 98 compatibility mode - Change the compatibility mode for the Setup.exe in the "properties". If successfull, you should have no problems installing the software, if you fail to do this, the setup requires "the latest patch" - an obvious nonsense.

Note: you can also apply the patches available from Sony (I used version 1.22 but I am not sure whether this is necessary or not.)

2) Install the PortTalk software (at http://www.beyondlogic.org/porttalk/porttalk.htm), run allowio.exe once and then copy the allowio.exe in the same directory where you have icd-pclink.exe. Then always start the icd-pclink.exe as:
allowio icd-pclink.exe /a
(some comment - allowio icd-pclink.exe 378 would seem to be OK but it did not work for me). If you are successful, the program should start OK.
I also created a small batch file containing the above line which works OK.
I switched the ICD-PCLINK.EXE in the Windows 98 compatibility mode but I am not sure whether this is necessary.

3) The program may tell you that the ICD did not connect properly (some stuff about the cable...). This issue can be solved through adjusting the parameters of the parallel port in BIOS and Windows. First, I adjusted the parallel port to Bidirectional mode in BIOS, then I selected configuration with no interrupt and no DMA at ports 378-37F, 778-77F in the device manager in Windows XP (I believe I used configuration 006 but this is probably not that important). I am not that sure that this is the only configuration that works. What is, however, important is that changing the parallel port setup worked so it is worth playing with this...

4) The program seemed to work until I decided to save the data from the ICD to the disk. I got the Overflow error - runtime error 6 - mentioned in this forum. Well, I discovered that the program only saved the files onto a FAT16 partition. I created one using the partition magic software (but many other will do, too). THIS IS THE PROBLEM I DID NOT OVERCOME - IT ONLY SAVES TO FAT16 partitions - definitely not to large FAT32 or NTFS partitions.

That's it

Pavel