[Fpga-synth] Parallel Cable III with modern boards?

[Rainer Buchty]

Guys,

did anyone try the Parallel Cable III with modern 2.5V-powered FPGA 
boards?

We recently acquired a bunch of Spartan 3AN-DSP boards for our undergrad 
courses; however, getting Parallel Cable IV for all of these is a bit 
ridiculous as they'd pretty much cost the same as the boards.

Hence the question whether anyone here knows if the PCIII still works 
with these boards; in theory, the parport should be happy with 2.4/2.5V 
(just about TTL high level) and the used 74HC-drivers will also happily 
work with that, but before I ship the board file for a couple of PCIII 
clones to Hungary, it would be nice to know if it'd be better to include 
USB-powered level shifters for driving the LPT input pins.

(There's nice Motorola app note flying around which should be easily 
adoptable incorporating double-buffering to provide proper 
level-shifting between LPT and "the outer world".)

Rainer