DOS printing in Win XP ?

[walker1]

My dad is using an older DOS program for acounting.
Until recently it worked fine under Win ME.

On his new PC he is running XP prof. and the software as such works fine.
The problem comes, when he wants to print something. At times it works fine and at other times the Windows spooler crashes, leaving some spool files behind.

The printer used is a Brother HL-5040, but inside the DOS app. it is set up as a HP Laserjet 4.

Under ME it might have worked, because it allows direct hardware access to tle LPT1 port, which XP has sealed off.
But why does it work on and off now?

And how can I make a stable system that works in both accounting and normal Windows?

I have quite some Delphi programming experience so work-arounds like setting the acounting app. to export spool files instead, capturing them in a Delphi app, sending it to the printer, and finally deleting the file, could be a solution.

But are ther better ones?

 

[itsmoked]

I would re-ask this question here:

http://www.tek-tips.com/threadminder.cfm?pid=779

Keith Cress
Flamin Systems, Inc.-

http://www.flaminsystems.com

 

[ScottyUK]

If your Brother printer has a true printer port - Centronics parallel or RS-232 serial - instead of USB, consider setting up a dual boot environment giving access to native DOS / Win 3.x and Win XP or whatever your preference is. We use quite a lot of DOS applications supporting the some of the equipment from the, late 80's and early 90's in our power plant, including DOX5 for the early SattCon PLCs and the config software for the numerical relays in the HV substation. We set up the boot options like this because every release of windows has even worse support for legacy applications than its predecessor and serial device control through the pseudo-DOS within XP is so flakey.

I think Win 2000 may have been an all-time low point for pseudo-DOS emulation, but DOS 6.22 certainly works great on a 2.8GHz P4 laptop. A further benefit is that you get to decide, or at least have some influence over, what the O/S is doing which is a pleasant change from later versions of Windows.


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Sometimes I only open my mouth to swap feet...

 

[xwb]

1) Can he print to a file and then print the file in windows?
2) Will the program output in postscript or PDF or PCL? Those formats are recognized by all versions of windows but printing will still be through an intermediate file.

What DOS does in printing is to set up a TSR (terminate and stay resident) program for printing. You can't do this in XP.

Another thing you could try is to switch on the win9x compatibility flag for the program. It might work properly then.

You could try tek-tips XP Pro forum (as mentioned by itsmoked) or

http://www.computing.net/dos/

http://wwwboard/wwwboard.html

http://www.computing.net/windowsxp/

http://wwwboard/wwwboard.html

The dos forum is quite active and there are quite a few there who still use DOS6.22 and Windows 3.x.