I built an interface cable as per published pinout, thanks to mitchjs for this and for answering my questions through tons of PMs.
BIG time thanks go to NOS TANG for all the info & support and the endless emails back & forth.
I wrote very small program in VB .NET to shoot the magic bytes down to the direct. If I have time this week I should be able to add command line param for port assignment so that it is not interactive, I will place it in the startup group so that it should take care of initializing the direct for me.
I tested the interface using XtreMePCR (ROCKS) and TimeTrax (****TY SW by the way, don't know what the fuss is all about - time shift does not turn me on

)
Man, it took me a while to get it working, the problem was with the serial to USB interface, once I moved it to another USB slot, it worked.
-The King