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At work, an old machine running Win2k and an Atari emulator is still used because reasons. The emulator always prints to the standard printer and that worked fine for decades.

Now our new masters, in their wisdom, decided to put all of our file servers into the cloud with SMB shares version 3.1.1 (Through a shaky 6-30 Mbit connection no less but that's another story.) The old W2k machine only speaks SMB1 and needs to be replaced. I got a replacement with a COM port (Yes we need that too) and got everything to work except for the printing. The software sends raw PCL/Epson code to the parallel port of the emulated Atari. (I should know, I wrote it)

This used to 'just work', now the print jobs just seem to vanish into thin air. Not even a blip in the spooler. I thought of redirecting LPT1: to an IP address, because our printers are just listening to raw data at port 9100.

There's a syntax on the net, something like 'net use LPT1: \server\blabla' I tried that after work today and got error 66, then gave up for today. I'm spent and will probably break more than I can fix. Just wondering if any of you have encountered a similar challenge and can point in the direction of a solution.

At work, an old machine running Win2k and an Atari emulator is still used because reasons. The emulator always prints to the standard printer and that worked fine for decades. Now our new masters, in their wisdom, decided to put all of our file servers into the cloud with SMB shares version 3.1.1 (Through a shaky 6-30 Mbit connection no less but that's another story.) The old W2k machine only speaks SMB1 and needs to be replaced. I got a replacement with a COM port (Yes we need that too) and got everything to work except for the printing. The software sends raw PCL/Epson code to the parallel port of the emulated Atari. (I should know, I wrote it) This used to 'just work', now the print jobs just seem to vanish into thin air. Not even a blip in the spooler. I thought of redirecting LPT1: to an IP address, because our printers are just listening to raw data at port 9100. There's a syntax on the net, something like 'net use LPT1: \\server\blabla' I tried that after work today and got error 66, then gave up for today. I'm spent and will probably break more than I can fix. Just wondering if any of you have encountered a similar challenge and can point in the direction of a solution.

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[–] • 1 pt

Re the W2k machine: No virtualization, the emulator runs on Win11. You can still buy it. It's called MagiC PC. Here's a link to the German site (Application Systems Heidelberg): https://www.application-systems.de/atari/produktefuratari.html

The Atari ST line was hugely successful in Germany. Notably in some industrial environments and the music production scene.

The OG machine is a Compaq Pentium III SFF PC. 512 MB of RAM. Good times.

[–] • 1 pt

That's wild. I never knew something like that was in use. I've worked around my fair of industrial machines too.

I think you're on the right track sending the lpt port traffic somewhere else. I've only ever used that when there was a print server in the mix though. I wonder if you could set up the printer in Win11, then share it. Then use the net use command to map it to the locally shared printer. Kinda circular logic but might work.

Similarly maybe try hooking up the printer via USB (if available) and mapping ltp1 to the USB port.

Make sure you're running the net use command in an elevated command prompt (right click, run as administrator). You also might need to create a local admin account and plug that into the net use command to bypass any account restrictions: net use ltp1:\\computer\printer /persistent:yes /user:username password

[–] • 1 pt (edited )

pointed me in the right direction, see below.

Should have been obvious but the day must have been too long... Thank you for the help!