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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

The printer was automagically configured and a test page has been printed. It only has an IP and a Network (NetBIOS?) name. No servers involved but I'll try net view <IP>.

As for the redirection guard, this is the first I hear of it, so no.

Thanks for the reply, appreciate it.

[–] • 1 pt

If the printer has an IP. I'd work on configuring it as a network printer in W11. open printers, add a printer, properties, ports, add an IP port pointing to the printer.

I assumed you had tried that already.

[–] • 1 pt

I haven't tried anything and I'm all out of ideas :) Good idea, I'll do that tomorrow. I used to do that on all machines for KISS reasons but as far as I can see, it's hooked up via the WSD system, which I never bothered to understand.

[–] • 1 pt (edited )

Thanks for your help! This worked just like a nigger doesn't :)

The Samsung driver that was installed, automatically gobbled up the print jobs and discarded them. I guess because it received unexpected data.

In retrospect, I should have known because that's how it was setup on the W2k machine also. Doh. Ended up using the "Generic/Text only" driver because the software generates the data stream on its own. On the old machine the Laserjet III driver was used, which also worked.

[–] • 1 pt

Glad I could assist with my limited knowledge!