Hey there, hope the weekend is being good to you all.

I have recently moved house & am in the process of setting up my home lab/office. In the previous house, I had a pretty sweet setup to transfer stuff from my main PC to my retro PC sitting on another desk using a parallel port laplink cable.

TLDR; new office space means the desk is now further away and my laplink cable is too short. I need one thats >= 4 meters long, and rather then buy one (even if I can find one of the correct length for sale somewhere) I'd rather make one.

Got what seem to be reasonable pin-outs for the cable from masterberg.se/hberg/CablePinouts. Problem is I need 18 core shielded cabling..... where would I find such cabling for sale? I'd settle for fewer cores and use multiple runs of cable between the plugs if need be.... within reason.

Looking at the usual electronics stores available locally (Christchurch NZ) & I'm not coming up with anything great, most of the multicore cable I can find at jaycar (NZs equivalent of RadioShack) is unshielded or only has 4 or fewer cores....

I guess I need to look elsewhere, but where?
Anyone else made their own parallel port laplink cable? If so what did you use?

I'll probably put together a long null modem serial cable to use for now, the transfer speed will be considerably less but it would do for a bit.

... Do it today. Tomorrow it will be illegal.

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Re: Making a Parallel Port Laplink cable
By: kirkspragg to All on Sat Aug 09 2025 18:36:32

Hi, Kirkspragg.

Got what seem to be reasonable pin-outs for the cable from masterberg.se/hberg/CablePinouts. Problem is I need 18 core shielded cabling..... where would I find such cabling for sale? I'd settle for fewer cores and use multiple runs of cable between the plugs if need be.... within reason.

I normally go to AliExpress for this kind of thing but the last time I looked up high core count cable I was a bit put off by the cost. I guess it's not a common thing to need any more and is priced accordingly.

I ended up using a couple of runs of cat 5 cable for my project but I'm not sure how a long run of parallel cable would cope with that, I imagine not well? I suppose on the upside it wouldn't cost much to try it out.

BobW
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Re: Making a Parallel Port Laplink cable
By: kirkspragg to All on Sat Aug 09 2025 18:36:32

stuff from my main PC to my retro PC sitting on another desk using a 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 =)

Mindsurfer
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kirkspragg wrote to All <=-

Hey there, hope the weekend is being good to you all.

TLDR; new office space means the desk is now further away and my
laplink cable is too short. I need one thats >= 4 meters long, and
rather then buy one (even if I can find one of the correct length for
sale somewhere) I'd rather make one.

They make boosters/adapters that run over 4-wire cabling

https://iec.net/product/parallel-data-extender-non-powered/

I remember using something similar back in the day. I don't know if it's
got enough pins for laplink, though.




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

stuff from my main PC to my retro PC sitting on another desk using a 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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stuff from my main PC to my retro PC sitting on another desk using a 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 =)

Despite the fact that laplink's name became associated with these cables, the software itself kinda sucks, is unreliable and drops connection all the time in my experience.

I haven't tried norton commander, I use fastlynx myself. Its small, fast and just works. I've never had it freeze or drop the connection mid transfer unlike laplink.

... Speed kills! Switch to Windows

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They make boosters/adapters that run over 4-wire cabling

https://iec.net/product/parallel-data-extender-non-powered/

I remember using something similar back in the day. I don't know if it's got enough pins for laplink, though.

Good suggestion, the manufacturer states it doesn't support the IEE 1284, but it may still be enough to work as those laptlink cables and the software using them (well fastlyx and laplink) will work on XT machine with an old non IEE 1284 printer port.

It is worth considering & its not that expensive either.

... FOSSIL Driver : He who chauffers old folks around

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I ended up using a couple of runs of cat 5 cable for my project but I'm not sure how a long run of parallel cable would cope with that, I
imagine not well? I suppose on the upside it wouldn't cost much to try
it out.

I might try that out, but it sounds like its gonna have issues with cross talk between the signal lines. Though maybe if I use an entire pair per signal line it will be fine? Use one cable in each pair as the signal & earth the other......

I'd need to use 5 parallel runs of cat 5 to do this though..... thats gong to be one monstrous cable! On the plus side shielded cat 5 should be easy enough to get hold of.

... Nostalgia: (n) The sensation of the good old days, magnified by a bad memor

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Re: Re: Making a Parallel Port Laplink cable
By: kirkspragg to Bob Worm on Sun Aug 10 2025 23:03:34

Hi, Kirkspragg.

I might try that out, but it sounds like its gonna have issues with cross talk between the signal lines. Though maybe if I use an entire pair per signal line it will be fine? Use one cable in each pair as the signal & earth the other......

I am not an expert on such things but I think twisted pairs only really help for balanced signals, not unbalanced (ground reference) signals. I could be wrong. In fact I'll drop my tame electrical engineer friend a note and see what he thinks.

I imagine he will think "What's that idiot doing now? Bodging again, no doubt".

BobW
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Problem is I need 18 core shielded cabling

You could try just extending the cable, with just a regular 25pin serial cable from Amazon, and maybe a gender changer if needed?

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kirkspragg wrote to Mindsurfer <=-

Despite the fact that laplink's name became associated with these
cables, the software itself kinda sucks, is unreliable and drops connection all the time in my experience.

I remember the days of infrared, trying to get Thinkpads to talk to USB
1.1 IRDA ports. How far we've come...



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Re: Making a Parallel Port Laplink cable
By: kirkspragg to All on Sat Aug 09 2025 18:36:32

I have recently moved house...

Where'd you move it to? ;)
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I am not an expert on such things but I think twisted pairs only really help for balanced signals, not unbalanced (ground reference) signals. I

I'm pretty sure you are right there.

could be wrong. In fact I'll drop my tame electrical engineer friend a note and see what he thinks.

I'd appreciate it if you did check with someone who knows better than I do!

I imagine he will think "What's that idiot doing now? Bodging again, no doubt".

Yes very much so. But then data transfer (and even networking) between computers via parallel port was always a bit of a bodge. The original parallel port really wasn't designed with this in mind!

... If you can't laugh at yourself, I'll laugh at you.

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You could try just extending the cable, with just a regular 25pin serial cable from Amazon, and maybe a gender changer if needed?

If its a serial cable it won't have all 25 pinns connected at both ends as serial doesn't use them all. So thats unlikely to work.

A 25 pin pass through cable might work if it's also shielded, maybe those exist? I'll have to look.

... If brains were taxed, he'd get a rebate.

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Re: Re: Making a Parallel Port Laplink cable
By: kirkspragg to Bob Worm on Mon Aug 11 2025 20:30:15

could be wrong. In fact I'll drop my tame electrical engineer friend a note and see what he thinks.

I'd appreciate it if you did check with someone who knows better than I do!

For what it's worth I asked my friend. He fired back a super long question about something he's trying to figure out and didn't answer - I will give him another kick shortly!

By the time he answers you might already have tried it out, though :)

BobW
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For what it's worth I asked my friend. He fired back a super long
question about something he's trying to figure out and didn't answer - I will give him another kick shortly!

By the time he answers you might already have tried it out, though :)

BobW

Maybe! I have figured out that I probably don't need a 18 core cable for this, 12 should do if I wire it up following the linux kernel docs for plip (docs.kernel.org/networking/plip.html) & use the "Parallel transfer mode 0 cable" schematic. That is for older non-bidirectional parallel ports, which is what my retro PC has so that should work.

So I could do it with 3 runs for 4 core shielded cabling I can get locally. Also less soldering involved! A win on two fonts!

... Is it ignorance or apathy? I don't know and don't care.

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