I am totally new here. Infact, I just got the demo version for E-Prime 2.0 to evaluate it

I do mainly emotion studies in which I present affective visual and or acustic stimuli. I would like to use E-Prime for building my experiments and have E-prime send markers for stimulus onset and offset to my different devices: Psylab, Finometer, and VU-AMS. Here are my questions/concerns.

1. Here almost everybody is talking about parallel ports to interface with other devices...great! My HP PC (tower model) has 3454 USBs but just one serial and ZERO parallel ports I guess, this is not a good start! What should I do? I think it is possible to install this. Am I right? Is this the best/first thing to do? ( I am not a technician, unfortunately). I talked to the guy of Psylab and yes it is possible to have an experimental software like E-Prime to send signals to Psylab through a parallel port...so I guess I need a parallel port for Psylab. Anyone working with Psylab and E-Prime or another experimental software??????????

2. What about interfacing throught the serial port for senting markers? Is that not possible/more complicated? The Finometer (which records blood pressure from the finger) can actually communicate with the PC through the serial port (through a null modem cable). This communication allows to start and stop a measurement, activate and disactivate a calibration, send MANUALLY a marker, and download the recordings from the Finometer to the PC. So I thought that maybe E-Prime could use this same serial port to sent markers to the Finometer; I asked the people of the Finometer but for the moment I got no answer

3. What about interfacing throught the 3454 USBs I have? Is that not possible??? I am very much interested in this BECAUSE the VU-AMS 5fs (notice that I have the latest version which allows to record cardiac parameters and SC together) communicates with my PC throught a USB port ONLY AND the guys of the VU-AMS sent me a "script" (.dll I guess) with which I should be able to have E-prime send signals to the VU-AMS. I have not tried that yet, though. So, is anyone using a USB port for interfacing with other hardware? Is anyone doing this with the VU-AMS????

4. Why these trivial questions? Well guys, in the documentation I got with the demo version there is virtually nothing about how to interface with hardware (rather disappointing!). I have seen here people writing about &H378, WritePort,etc. How can I even think to try to test the interface without a written support that guides me through???? Does a specific manual for "Interfacing with the "harware" exist? NOTICE that I do not have access to the SUPPORT because I have not bought E-Prime yet. Is is possible to get a documentation from PST about that, please

5. My main interest of buying E-Prime is because of sending markers automatically to my differet devices. I was just wondering if E-Prime is the optimal software for that or if there are other software that are more user-friendly or give more interaction possibilities (through, parallel ports, serial ports, USB, etc).

I hope someone can help me!!

Cheers