I worked on a project a little while back where I manually controlled the individual pins of the parallel port using "outb" and "inb" in c++. For my next project, I'd like to transition to the USB port (mostly because I like the readily available 5V supply... and those serial cables are big and clunky). I did a bit of research online and didn't find any references to specific port commands to manually control the USB pins.
Is there a fundamental difference between the old style parallel ports and the new USB ports that you can't actually control the USB pins yourself?
The para port has individual bits which can be manipulated via software control. USB is a serial bus and transmits data in packet form using the USB protocol.
If you read up on the USB protocol you will get your answer. Have a look at this link. **broken link removed**