Re: [Freedos-user] Printer Drivers needed for old DOS programs

[Eric A. <e....@jp...>]

Hi Carl, Bernd,

>> I have a newer HP printer and need drivers for DOS and Win311 also
>> Wordstar.

That depends on what you want to do - I assume most
printers can still print plain text, but WordStar
would allow you to use custom layout, probably just
a collection of Escape codes for, say, bold, italic
and so on. You could try making your own, if there
is a sufficiently verbose handbook, maybe online...

Note that the newest WordStar version is from 1987,
so I guess you will not find much more than ESC/P2
or ESC/P, older HP PCL, maybe PostScript. Actually
the latter might be a good idea, try some generic
laser printer driver. But then, cheap new printers
do not usually support that, I would say...

For DOS, you do not need drivers as long as you do
just plain text, things like "copy hello.txt lpt1"
or the printscreen button.

For Windows, you probably want drivers which let
you send graphical data, for example to let Windows
print Word texts with truetype fonts etc. - Again,
a generic PostScript driver or similar might work.

> Likely these drivers won't even exist. Typically under DOS, data was
> sent over the parallel port to printer, thus no drivers needed. Windows

Even over the parallel port, you can send non-text :-)

> 3.x might have had some drivers for printers, but unlikely HP creates
> Win31-drivers for their new hardware. Maybe a generic choice like using
> the HP Deskjet500C driver will do the trick, or some Postscript or PCL

I agree.

> driver. Hope your device it's not a so-called Win-Printer (just like
> Win-Modems) which means operating systems outside of Windows can't make
> the printer function as most processing is done by software instead of
> the printer hardware processor itself.

Those are also called GDI printers: They only have
some sort of simple, printer specific data format,
while only the Windows driver software understands
more standard interfaces. So you can only use them
with the Windows driver or a complex driver which
is likely to be only available for Linux, not DOS.

>> The printer is an all in one with USB which I can convert to parallel.

Probably using some sort of hardware adapter?

Interesting. By the way, small network devices
(e.g. router) which can connect USB WLAN, UMTS,
3G or similar sticks on one side and classic
network cable on the other side are also a good
idea to get around the chronic lack of wireless
network drivers for modern devices in DOS - you
more often do find drivers for network cards and
routers or similar wireless "bridges" are cheap.

> Ehm? There's USB-adapters to connect LPT-printers which work, and
> there's printers that have both USB and parallel port. That would also
> work. A printer without parallel port can't be connected to parallel
> port on your machine by any converter whatsoever.

So there are converters :-)

>> Where can I find such?

Probably not at all - 1987 is long ago, but you
can still find drivers for CLASSIC protocols and
hope your new printer supports one of them. And
you can still define your own ESC sequences if
you are already happy with WordStar being able
to make some parts of your text bold etc etc.

Cheers, Eric

PS: Happy almost new year to everybody :-)