I’ve never seen a parallel port on a PCMCIA card but also likely won’t work. The DCC studio and DCC backup software won’t find the port unless it’s at one of the dedicated I/O addresses where parallel ports would be. And it accesses the port directly with CPU instructions that are illegal for normal programs under Windows NT (which includes any version of Windows 2000 and newer).
The software MAY be usable under Windows Me (I never tried) but it was tested with Windows 98. If you have to set up an old version of Windows just to use DCC studio or DCC backup, you might as well use a version of Windows that it was tested with.
The DCC2WAV software works on Windows up to XP by the way, because it doesn’t need the connection to the recorder and XP is the last version of Windows that can run 16 bit programs. But it’s really slow. Instead, you can use an MPEG 1 layer 1 encoder/decoder and my DCCU utility to convert MP1 files to MPP for the DCC-studio program and vice versa.
The DCC backup program is pretty useless for any real world applications. It doesn’t recognize long file names so it’s really only useful up to Windows 3.1. And because data is recorded to DCC cassette at 384kbps, it’s very slow compared to other solutions. Also the capacity of about 250 megabytes per tape makes it uninteresting.
And before you ask: you also can’t use Windows 98 in a virtual machine on a real machine where you let the VM emulate the printer port from a real printer port. I admit, I haven’t tried this in a long time (probably 2003) but it didn’t work back then. The DCC studio software uses the printer port directly without a driver, and the emulation would have to cooperate specifically with DCC studio to be able to do this.
=== Jac