>I have never heard of software suppliers modifying the pinout of the dongles
>provided by the dongle manufacturer. I would doubt this would actually
>happen as they seem to use the control pins on the ports to send an I2C type
>serial communication between the dongle and the port.
>
>Early dongles used I2C EEPROM's as discrete chips.

This was so simple that it wasn't even I2C.  And the software
writer didn't do the pin reassignment, you just requested
it as a configuration option when you had the dongle
made.  I'm sure you all realize that you use one of
the data lines as a clock, rather than the real strobe
line of the parallel port.

As the discussion of how to make or use dongles goes on
I'll mention that doing timing-dependent things is
another trick I've seen.

I forgot that we used another vendor before we used
Rainbow, so some of this may apply to the earlier
devices.

Barry

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