Re: [Freedos-user] Print spooler suggestions.

[Jim H. <jh...@fr...>]

I haven't tried it in years, but you might try the Spool program. We
include it in FreeDOS, under Drivers:
https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/repositories/1.4/html/en/drivers/spool/20250410.1/index.html


I used this all the time back when I had a dot matrix printer. It sends
data to the printer when the computer is less busy. At the time, I could
write a document and print at the same time-- the more I typed, the slower
it printed, and vice versa.

Very handy program at the time. I don't know if it will cache 5MB of data
though.



On Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 6:51 PM G.W. Haywood via Freedos-user <
fre...@li...> wrote:

> Hi there,
>
> Does anyone have any recommendations or suggestions for print spoolers?
>
> I'm looking for something that can replace the venerable "Super-PCKWIK"
> which according to my notes hasn't worked for me since January 2000.  I
> guess that's about the time I upgraded the box to 64MBytes of RAM. :(
>
> Ideally, the spooler would sit between whatever application DOS is
> running and the printer, cache all the output to the printer in EMS
> memory (which is plentiful) and let the application carry on doing
> stuff whilc it feed the cached data to the printer as fast as the
> printer can swallow it.  This is more-or-less what PCKWIK did when
> it was working.  Now it just crashes at boot.  In case it matters,
> the printer in this case is the parallel port printer (LPT1:).
>
> AFAICT the PRINT.COM which comes with MS-DOS only uses the base 640K
> of RAM so it's no use to me.  On a bad day, I'll be needing to cache
> about 5 MBytes of print data.
>
> --
>
> 73,
> Ged.
>
>
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