DOS Printing to a USB printer

Hi there all,
I have several old DOS programs which I still use for various reasons (eg Wordstar 5). I also have several programs I've written using GWBASIC and MBASIC. These programs were all for a DOS environment and USB wasn't probably even thought of then. I want to keep using these programs but modern computers and laptops tend not to have serial or parallel ports that older printers can connect to. Also at some point my trusty parallel DataProducts Laser printer will probably give up the ghost. The programs I have written myself contain lots of control codes to control print size, formatting etc and are written for an IBM ProPrinter emulation.

So the question is "How can I redirect/force/get around, to make my DOS programs to print to a USB printer"

Thanks ... John N

I found DOSPRN by Googling.
Its free & might be worth a shot

Any chance you can connect the printers directly to the network or a print server? If not, you can share the printer from your pc, then map a LPT port to the share name.

It is both easy and hard to do this....
If you share the printer with a short name(!!!), you can then do NET USE LPT1: \\<yourcomputername>\<sharename> /PERSISTENT:YES to make the printer work. I've done this hundreds of times.
The hard part is the printer will have to have Proprinter emulation and you had better stay away from a 64 bit O/S or your programs won't work.

Problem with NET USE is indeed that the printer can emulate a DOS printer.
DOSBox is great for running DOS programs, but mainly targetted at gaming.
If you need DOS just for serious business, I wrote my own version of DOSBox for that.
It uses another great program DOSPrinter for printing, supporting USB printers, EMF/PDF/RTF and mailing.
Configuring it to start a DOS application is a snap.
No cpu, joystick, soundblaster and all those unneeded gaming hardware settings.
Supports LPT1-9 and COM1-9 for printing.

Sir;: See my post this date, about Dos,. wp51 and x copy.  There is a printing formular in there which works to print to usb, however, it is laced with wp-51 printing symbols, which is stated as my problem.

 

It is a good start though.

 

There is printing program out of Britain called PRINTFIL which you can purchase for this purpose, but you will be paying a yearly fee.

 

I prefer to work this out with DOS commands, but, as my post says, I too need a little help to perfect it.

 

44 Guy

Will the person who wrote his own DOSBOX program to solve this dos printing problem, please let us all know how to use the program you came up with?

 

44  guy