Re: [Freedos-user] Print spooler suggestions.

[G.W. H. <fr...@ju...>]

Hello again,

On Wed, 1 Apr 2026, G.W. Haywood via Freedos-user wrote:
> On Tue, 31 Mar 2026, Ben Collver via Freedos-user wrote:
>> From: "G.W. Haywood" ...
>>> 
>>> Does anyone have any recommendations or suggestions for print spoolers?
>>> ...
>> 
>> DMP can use EMS memory.  This isn't a recommendation because i
>> haven't actually used DMP.  Here's a download link:
>> 
>> ftp://ftp.oldskool.org/pub/simtelnet/msdos/printer/dmp205.zip
>
> That looks very promising indeed, thank you!
>
> I'll give it a whirl and report.

Thanks again for this pointer.  I installed DMP this afternoon.

So far it has exceeded all expectations.  If it continues to live up
to its claims then without any doubt it will be by far the best print
spooling utility for DOS that I've ever seen.  I wish I'd known about
it three decades ago.  The current (if that's the right word) version
is 2.05, dated February 10th 1991.

The main (English only) documentation file notes that it was updated
January 15th 1991 and is for version 2.03, but there's an addendum of
the same date as the DMP.COM TSR utility, February 10th 1991.

The documentation is excellent, clear and thorough.  From scratch it
took me ten minutes to get DMP working, no false starts

The TSR is about 22.5k.  AFAICT DMP can use *any* available memory for
its cache *including* mass storage (although it cautions against the
use of floppies for caching :) and it can use them all simultaneously.

So far because the system I'm working on handles financial information
I've been cautious with the configuration.  When I get the chance I'll
pull out all the stops to see what happens when I throw the kitchen
sink at it.

The docs talk about "MS-DOS and PC-DOS versions 2.0 thru 4.1" but for
my first attempt today I was running MS-DOS 6.22.  There were AFAICT
no issues on that front.

The source code would be a tremendous addition to the hive knowledge
if it could be found.  I've searched for the original supplier/author,
so far without success.

It's not often I'm as over the moon as this about a piece of software.
Perhaps there should be a pointer to this thread somewhere in the docs
about spoolers for FreeDOS?

Well, thanks once again.  Made my day.

-- 

73,
Ged.