Using a Galep-4 on modern PC with Windows 7 (64bit)

I've had this programmer many years and it's always been my favorite as it supports a wide range of chips and is extremely reliable. The problem is as it's old it only supports a parallel port connection. My i7 PC doesn't have a serial port let alone a parallel one, so this means every time I want to use the galep I have to hook up an old ibm thinkpad and save / load any files using a usb pen.

Getting tired of this I went searching to see if anyone had come up with a solution to connect the galep 4 up using USB. The short answer is you can but it's extremely slow, no point in that so I almost gave up. After more searching I found reports of people having success using pci/e parallel port cards, not just that but there's also a 64bit driver for the galep software available now.

So I head to ebay and look for the cheapest pci parallel port card I can find and this one comes up, £2.98 including postage! crazy cheap. I was a little too quick hitting the buy it now button because although the description says it supports windows 7 it doesn't mention 32/64bit hmm. After checking the driver cd sure enough only 32bit drivers.

Before buying a more expensive card that has 64bit drivers I did a bit more googling to see if there were newer and more importantly 64bit drivers for this generic card. Luckily I found an amazon listing for this card with a driver link, they no longer sell the card but the link still worked.

The rar file included 64bit drivers woot!


Next I installed the latest Galep32 software (1.20.4 at the time of writing this) and then followed the instructions here to install the galep 64bit driver. I loaded it up and it worked first time, now the awful GQ-3X programmer can be retired yay.