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Laplink was so great and always worked. The only thing was the lack of possibility to play games over parralell link, only serial was possible. That is not lapl

Laplink was so great and always worked. The only thing was the lack of possibility to play games over parralell link, only serial was possible. That is not laplinks' fault but rather the technology. Naturally parallell 25 pin cables had a much higher throughoutput rate than serial 9pin links had.

tokamak-teapot 5y ago
I used to play multiplayer DOOM over parallel port in 1994. https://www.doomworld.com/files/file/836-parallel-link-driver-for-doom/ https://www.doomworld.com/files/file/836-parallel-link-drive...
MisterTea 5y ago
What games did Laplink enabled serial multiplayer for? Back then game devs had to roll their own. And likely they chose to avoid parallel because early ports were not intended for communication but rather a primitive extension of the CPU bus to an external device, originally printers. It allowed you to send bytes to a device and then read back a few GPIO like signals the device would set to indicate things like acknowledged, error, paper jam and so on. It was only later on they added functionality and smarts in the form of ECP/EPP with two way data transfers, buffers, IRQ and DMA. On top of all that, a parallel bus over cable is severely limited to something like 4-5 meters or 15 feet. Serial from the get-go was designed for device-device coms and with the right cable, RS232 can extend up to 100m. Of course you can change the electrical interface of serial to a differential, current or fiber interface and extend serial to reach many km.
- unixhero 5y ago
  Thanks for the deep dive! No games, and I didn't say that either. Although the post itself was a bit unstructured I can see how you thought that.
  - MisterTea 5y ago
    It did read as if laplink was part of serial gaming and wondered if there was some alternate functionality or API/TSR it offered which I was ignorant of.
- andrewf 5y ago
  As a youngster the two household computers were connected with parallel and serial lines (for Laplink and games!) I didn't realize ECP supported DMA.. when compared to a (16550 UART) serial port, that sounds like an ever bigger win than the 8 (vs 1) data wires!

tokamak-teapot 5y ago

I used to play multiplayer DOOM over parallel port in 1994. https://www.doomworld.com/files/file/836-parallel-link-driver-for-doom/ https://www.doomworld.com/files/file/836-parallel-link-drive...

MisterTea 5y ago

What games did Laplink enabled serial multiplayer for? Back then game devs had to roll their own. And likely they chose to avoid parallel because early ports were not intended for communication but rather a primitive extension of the CPU bus to an external device, originally printers. It allowed you to send bytes to a device and then read back a few GPIO like signals the device would set to indicate things like acknowledged, error, paper jam and so on. It was only later on they added functionality and smarts in the form of ECP/EPP with two way data transfers, buffers, IRQ and DMA. On top of all that, a parallel bus over cable is severely limited to something like 4-5 meters or 15 feet. Serial from the get-go was designed for device-device coms and with the right cable, RS232 can extend up to 100m. Of course you can change the electrical interface of serial to a differential, current or fiber interface and extend serial to reach many km.

unixhero 5y ago
Thanks for the deep dive! No games, and I didn't say that either. Although the post itself was a bit unstructured I can see how you thought that.
- MisterTea 5y ago
  It did read as if laplink was part of serial gaming and wondered if there was some alternate functionality or API/TSR it offered which I was ignorant of.
andrewf 5y ago
As a youngster the two household computers were connected with parallel and serial lines (for Laplink and games!) I didn't realize ECP supported DMA.. when compared to a (16550 UART) serial port, that sounds like an ever bigger win than the 8 (vs 1) data wires!