I have gotten myself into a strange project trying to hack a DTV converter, but I have little experience with these things (part of the reason i'm trying)

I got it off amazon for free with the government sponsored coupon, its a Zinwell ZAT-970A. My attempts to actually get any reception were fruitless, but whats more interesting is that it allows for a firmware upgrade for a variety of things including code, logo, etc. It can do this over the air or over RS232. There is no serial port on the back, so I opened it up and sure enough there is a little space labeled RS232 with four holes for a TTY connection. So some research and soldering later I made a MAX232 TTL to RS232 converter, which I now have plugged into my computer. (Hoping that all works)

The problem I have now though is the MAX232 converter I have set up is 25-pin, so I plugged it into my printer port (LPT1). As far as I can see, I can't use any RS232 communication software on LPT1, I have to use a COM port. So I want the LPT1 to behave like a COM port. I know you can make a virtual COM port off of USB, but is it possible for LPT1? Or am I going to have to do some more soldering and use a 9-pin serial? (Obviously a software solution if at all possible would be cheaper and easier)

Course once I get it working, in all likelihood i'll just end up bricking the thing, lol. Zinwell doesn't provide any code or firmware upgrades on it's website, its meant for factory use only. So I really wouldn't know where to start in trying to dump the existing code first. Oh well.

Any help is very appreciated, thanks in advance.

The serial port voltage levels & pinout are not compatable with your printer port.
Either wire up an adapter like this: http://www.tech-faq.com/9-25-serial-adapter.shtml
or just buy a 9 pin to 25 pin adapter. They are cheap. http://www.abccables.com/ca-003524.html

Thanks Cerberus, I took your advice and went digging for a serial port. Much to my surprise when I soldered it up it actually worked. I used Realterm (Best RS232 software I have found, and of course the best are always free) started trying out random Baud Rates and found a couple that worked. It seems like it should use a Software XON XOFF handshake since im not getting any activity on any pins other than RX. But its not the standard 17 and 19.

At a baud rate of 115200 and Parity set at even, I get no errors and a constant loop of 0D 63. I have no idea what to send to respond to declare it has a connection.
At 57600 and no parity I get a sort of random loop of FE FD F9 FD FE F4 etc, sortof inconsistent though.
At 38400 and 19200 I get just FFs.

So I think the proper Baud rate is 115200, but im out of ideas for how I can actually start communicating with this device. The box keeps retrying the connection 100 times - so I have been sending any random thing I can think of in that time period but it just keeps sending the same loop in response. Anyone have any ideas? Thanks in advance.

Try setting your serial port for baud = 115200, data = 8, parity = none, stop = 1, and flow = none.
Fire up Hyperterminal and try different sending different letters, numbers and symbols. (like ?, @, #, &, !, etc) You may get lucky and bring up a debug mode or a command menu.

I tried every character with and without a carriage return after it, no luck. I did find something interesting, when I start it up this comes over the line:

Unfortunetley I tried researching with this with no good results. So currently I have no way of knowing the protocol used here without making tons and tons of guesses. Which got me to thinking if there was a way to automate those guesses. Does anyone know of any software that can brute force an rs232 device for any response?

I see you are making progress. You now have the correct serial port settings and the information displayed in the serial console indicates the operating system & the processor family.

You could just call up the company and ask to speak to an engineer... like in the myvue thread... or maybee social engineer them out of some info...