Velleman Software on Linux

I like my Velleman PCS500. Its not perfect, but it does a good job and has been my “bench scope” for awhile now edging out my old faithful Tek scope for all but the most demanding jobs. However, there are two things I definitely don’t like about it. It uses a parallel port which many of my computers no longer have and the software doesn’t run under Linux.

When I built my last computer I stuck a cheap PCI parallel card in it. Of course, the PCI bus puts it at some wacky address like 0xE000 and most software can’t find it. I read this article: http://www.lafraze.net/nbernard/doc/misc_tips/velleman.html but it didn’t help either since the I/O wrapper won’t work on “high ports.” For the longest time I’ve just used an old Windows laptop as my “scope” and that’s worked ok.

But today I finally cracked the code to running the software under Linux (see the picture). Here’s what I did:

1) Set the permissions on the /dev/parport0 device to 666 (or you could add your user ID to the lp group and set it to 664 or 660):
sudo chmod 666 /dev/parport0

2) Create a new wine prefix:
WINEPREFIX=~/pcs500 winecfg

3) Inside winecfg set the default operating system to Win98. Close winecfg.

4) Run the wine regedit program. Create a key under HKEY_CURRENT_USER named Software\Wine\VDM\ppdev. Create a string value named 378 and make the value /dev/parport0. This must be under Current User and not System!

5) Download the PCLab2000SE software from Velleman and run setup like this:
WINEPREFIX=~/pcs500 wine setup.exe

6) Finish the install then run pcs500.exe from the ~/pcs500/drive_c/Program Files/Velleman/PcLab2000SE directory:
WINEPREFIX=~/pcs500 wine pcs500.exe

7) If you like, make a shortcut in your desktop software to launch this automatically.

I have noticed the software occasionally hangs up under Wine — don’t know if it is a problem with Wine or a problem with the software, but it doesn’t happen enough to be a problem.

Hope that works for you!