Re: Xy-Dosemu (and Dosbox) non-Postscript printer

["Patricia M. Godfrey" priscamg@xxxxxxxx]

Paul Lagasse wrote:
> Is yr problem with a printer connected to another computer on yr
> Vista-capable nonnetwork network, or to a printer connected to the USB
> port of yr computer?
USB port of this PC. No problem printing to truly networked
printers. (I had to check just the other day: we're thinking of
getting a Vista box at the office, and had to be sure it would
have drivers for the rather antiquated LJ printer we use. So I
lugged the laptop over, plugged it into the network--which it
recognizes without a whimper, despite all the horror stories I've
been seeing online about networking XP and Vista; and this
network has W2K and even 98 in the mix--went to Add Printer,
chose Network Printer, and it id'd it and installed the drivers
just so. Printed a test page, and all was smooth.)
> >creating
> an identical (nonexistent) printer on LPT1 and pooling it.
Very clever! Esp. as printer pooling is apparently one of those
things BBB doesn't think end-users need to know about. Not a word
about it in the help files, nor in any of my books (Vista or XP)
> Add a printer wizard. I stopped WinXP from automatically finding the
> printer and instead worked through the printer selection menus to
> identify my printer.
Nope. Tried that jut now, using the Generic driver (since I don't
have an HP printer here). Enabled pooling, but when I tried to
print from Xy (having setp to the ASCII.PRN), I got printer not
ready. And when I did printf, and then tried either
copy d:\xy4\fo.tmp lpt1
or
type d:\xy4\fo.tmp>lpt1
I got
Cannot find the file specified. The "file" was, of course, lpt1;
cmd.exe could definitely find d:\xy4\fo.tmp.
Interestingly, when I had the laptop hooked up to an HP deskjet
at the office (where there is a network) and tried Net Use, I was
able to map the USB port to lpt1, and could print to it from
edit.com and copy to it from the command line, but not from
within Xy. Now I do print to a mapped USB port on the W2K box, so
I tried copying that whole Xy installation to my laptop and using
that (to see if it was any setting in my Xy setup that was
gumming up the works). No go. Vista does _not_ want you to run
old software--but ironically, I still find that Xy runs better on
Vista than on XP or W2K. Go figure.
And, of course, TYP works fine. Or one could create a batchfile
or a U2 routine to copy fo.tmp to a mapped lpt1 on a system with
a network configured. The catch is that you apparently cannot
have a network _and_ have dialup, because whoever designed Vista
cannot believe there's anyone without broadband.

--
Patricia M. Godfrey
priscamg@xxxxxxxx