LPT+DOS is quite a nice stuff. Quite contrary to anything like windows, anything tied to USB, even any usual non RT optimized cutdown linux kernels, macos, whatever else is clumsy nonrealtime full of surprises son of a b*tch crappy performing stream flow hickup overcomplicated crap never ready when you want it to...
I still miss DOS & LPT dev stuff and gear, as well as Roland MPU401 as ISA-8 card for MIDI... Regarding PC there's almost nothing more stable, fast and hardware-like performing than that :-/ And it's bad how rapidly evrything degrades.
I still have a dusty windows 3.11 comp (a P2-266 with 48MB ram) with cakewalk pro and roland mpu401. You know - nothing ever performed more stable and kick ass solid as that. Reinstalling? WTF when and why? I installed or even better - copied everything when I bought hardware - about 15 years ago - why wouldn't it perform any worse then in the first day? It's just that it doesn't work with any largee midi interface/patchbay units so it's stuck in this state forever :-/
Quite sad to see all the other stuff with gigahertz/dualcore/terabyte/gigabyte/hunderds of megabits transferrate/whatever other crap we are fed, to perform that weak as it does
It's completely unnecessary thing we do (and find it soo elite) to waste taime on cutting down and optimizing OS, fighting with processes and crapware we dont need, most of people having resource hungry antivirus crap installed, or
even worse - any legal software with iLok USB license key or similar looser stuff.
I have legal software for my studio and I regret it. Both Cakewalk and Cubase.
USB is the biggest disaster, as anything else touched by intel geniuses
99% of things with USB are just kludges that are still using rs232 (COM) or LPT stuff, just wrapped in quite a lot of unnecessary layers and driver levels. It cannot perform any better than what it is inside, even if it is overclocked, because of too many driver and software layers, each having a lot of buffers, exceptions, processing and sorting latency, e.t.c.
You can have a thing that works in DOS with LPT, or port of it to windows, that will use overclocked virtual serial port and FTDI245 chip on the other side that will be somewhat the same as LPT in hardware side. For the user it will look much more appealing, but will perform much worse and less stable, even while it seems faster. Expect losing some bytes on some machines when moving large streams, expect anything realtime ruining hickups (actually transfer consists of only a bursts and hickups), expect many other strange surprises...
To fix such stuff you need much more complicated and sophiscated hardware, that handles all timing-critical processing and playback in itself, what requires large memory buffer (because you know that redrawing clock in taskbar or shudden checking for whatever updates, or processing engless broadcasted eth packets is much more important than that useless user application). Large buffer and playback handling in hardware means nowhere near realtime response from the pc/mac controls. And for recording some synchronous input (let's say midi in) to some track in your application, how yuo need even more hellish hardware that will pack incoming midi in data with timing tokens that are retrieved form stream that is at that very time being transfered out of it.
And don't be too much surprised that pc/mac will just not be ready to work with you that very day you will feel like creating something.
Just like if you create that usb hardware and then start fighting with a more awesome surprise: windows detecting your simple-serial-port-bridge-over-crappy-usb based unit as a "microsoft ballpoint device" or something (i dont remember the exact name). It turns out some microsoft crappy kludgehardware that they were for some ununderstandable reason producing a while ago, are just the same bridge based simple serial port stuff (to fool people to buy new computers with usb 1.1 to be able to use it).
Ok moaning mode OFF