EPrime / Presentation / MATLAB - replacing the obsolete Parallel Port with PCI 6601s

[artaxerxes]

Hey,

Paralllel Ports are vanishing on PCs and a lot of Psycho Physics experimental suites rely on Parallel Port interrupts and being "DMA register accessible".  I have been looking to replace the paralllel ports with PCI 6601 - the counter function will suffice for Presentation, and the Data Acquisition toolbox is fine for MATLAB.

The stickler is EPrime - all I need is 1bit to indicate the fMRI has triggered.

I have asked if they have an alternative to the Parallel Port - I received this

"As for your question, the commands in E-Prime used for data I/O (e.g. WritePort, OnsetSignalPort) require the adapter to be DMA register accessible. The parallel port falls into this category. Digital I/O Cards from National Instruments and other vendors do not and require accessing those adapters through DLLs. As such, we recommend the direct use of the parallel port. For information on general port communications, please see INFO: General Parallel Port Information.

E-Prime can call into DLL functions and can use the CreateObject API to attach to some COM objects. Both of these issues should be addressed by a professional programmer and are beyond the scope of PST support. We can supply you with a sample and some additional information upon request; however, we must stress that even if communication can be obtained, timing cannot be guaranteed."

What sort of undertaking would it be to create the objects EPrime discuss to allow integration with the PCI 6601?

Many many thanks.

[Tori.M]

Hi artaxerxes,

Thanks for using the NI forums!

Having looked into the specs for the PCI-6601 it does have 1 DMA channel, and therefore can carry out one buffered high speed operation at one time.

The Wikipedia page on Direct Memory Access provides a little bit more information on how PCI cards use DMA.

For the DLL that you may need, you could always try contacting one of our Alliance members to see if they could create this dll for you?

Hope this has provided you with a little more information!

Kind regards,

[artaxerxes]

Many thanks for your response, I will see if the Alliance can offer me a programmer.

[nutation]

Hi artaxerxes,

I see that this post is over a couple of years old, but I was wondering if you ever were able to resolve the issue.  I am currently in the same boat. I am running E-Prime from the bootcamp partition of a MacMini and would like to use it to trigger / send dig codes to a Biopac acquisition system. In the past I've used the NIDAQ 6601 to accomplish this with Matlab and PsychoPy, but now I need to use E-Prime.

Anyway, it'd be very helpful  if you'd let me know whether you ultimately figure out a workaround or if you gave up and went another direction.

Thanks