"DOS BOX" applications/POS systems in windows

[untoldtech]

I'm curious if anyone here has encountered these applications. I have customers who are using a dos looking application on their computer to print to PARALLEL printers. It's not a shell server from what I can tell or anything like that it's locally run and I believe they connect in via terminal app to use the application that connects to some sort of database. So it's really just a non-gui based frontend to a database. Unfortunately the person who wrote the program didn't leave much if any documentation on how it worked.

Have you dealt with this before on how to reconfigure print jobs for these types of applications? It's current setup to send print jobs to a HP print server (ethernet based) (that runs literally like year 2004 java) and sends the job to the printer. I dont know how the POS/appliaction knows what the layout of the paper is or where it is configured, would it be somewhere in an admin account on the appliaction? The problem is one of the ports on the print server has gone bad and these print servers are hard to come by so it would be easier to reconfigure the appliaction to print to one of these tplink print server/parallel ports but that would mean changing the IP address the application uses to send the job to for this printer. Ideas?

 

[jmitservices]

I just recently completed a job for a newsagents here that are running a REALLY old version of CTN Supernews (running on Windows 95). This software basically controls their entire business. The machine went pop a few weeks ago so I built them a new computer running Windows 7 with Windows XP running in a VM with the Supernews.

They were using two old parallel printers, one for receipts and another impact printer for end of month accounts. Trying to get VM to share a PCIe Parallel card was a bit of a nightmare. Managed to get them to change the printers to more modern USB ones. However the program itself will only print to LPT1 (nothing in the program to change this).

Found this very handy program which fixed that, DOSPRN (Its about $12). Lets you redirect the LPT to another port i.e. USB.

Hope that was useful!

 

[glennd]

However the program itself will only print to LPT1 (nothing in the program to change this).

That was my thought. Back in the day there was only ever LPT1 and the "expensive" computers had LPT2 so the programmer would just hard code the application for LPT1 and because there was no such thing as printer drivers, everything to do with the printer output is hard coded. You might get lucky and find a cfg file with some options but don't put money on it.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

We've used DOSBos many times over the years, and way back in the day I used to setup DOS programs over networks, got very familiar with how DOS interacts with hardware, I/O addresses, IRQs, getting very granular with COM and LPT.

First, find out where the print commands are, yes there's a menu somewhere where you can tell it where to send certain print jobs, LPT1, LPT2, LPT3, etc.
HP JetDirect...the interface is Java, sounds like an old one, you can update the firmware on it. Probably has a print capture command to map an LPT to the Jetdirect port, done within the host OS.

So if it's really a DOS app, it likely does not print to an IP address, I bet the network printer is mapped to LPT on the host.

 

[mikeroq]

Myself, I use the DOSBox Megabuild, which has printing support. In that case DOSBox can map the LPT port in a config file, it could pass thru to LPT1 and the LPT1 port on the OS could be mapped to a network printer with net use.