I don't have an old printer any longer with parallell port, but is there any options available for printer emulation software to use on old PCs so I can print from my modern laser printer?
What model printer? Most network ready units support PCL and Postscript these days.
Most newer Printers have a USB interface - more expensive models also support printing over a TCP/IP network. The solution depends on the specs of your printer and old PC and other hardware you have. Normally it would be cheaper to buy an old parallel-port laser printer for 10 bucks on ebay than investing much money into adaptors/converters and such stuff. There are no "I connect a USB device to my parallel port" adaptors if that's what you'd be hoping for, so network printing is the only halfway reasonable option, but if you look at the money then I'd really recommend considering to buy an old parallel port laser printer, used ones sometimes sell for 1-10 dollars.
wrote:I'd really recommend considering to buy an old parallel port laser printer, used ones sometimes sell for 1-10 dollars.
Not really an option as I don't live in a country where people sell their old printers (it's free to deliver them for recycling). Getting one from Ebay will just be too expensive on shipping.
My printer is an USB Brother HL-2040. I've checked Brother's webpage and the y offer Windows 9X drivers. I was planning on using it as a network printer (shared through my Windows 7 PC). I've also seen that there are a program called DOSUSB print which allows printing to USB and network printers through the dosbox window in Windows9x. This kinda sorts out DOS printing, but Windows 3.11 and pure DOS will still be unavailable I guess? The printer needs DOS/Win31 driver to work as a network printer? I was hoping there maybe was some kind of emulation software that converted the printout and sent it to the printer.
Its a GDI printer, so you'll need a workaround. You need to create a "virtual" Postscript printer to share on the network. Here is how: http://www.stat.tamu.edu/~henrik/GSPSprinter/ … SPSprinter.html
Make sure you grab the latest REDMon 1.9 and Ghostscript for Windows 7 compatibility: http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/
Basically the REDMon "printer" takes whatever data you send to it and forwards it to Ghostscript, which rasterizes the Postscript printer output for your printer. Drivers on the old machine shouldn't be a problem now as EVERYTHING supports Postscript printing.
WfW 3.11/Win9x will have no problem printing to this shared printer as it supports NetBIOS over TCP/IP. Pure DOS should support it as well assuming you can get the MS LAN Manager Client working (see: http://www.jacco2.dds.nl/samba/dos.html#lanman ). I think WfW 3.11 can redirect a virtual LPT port to a printer share like Win9x can if you want to run the DOS apps under Windows.
Amazing info NJRoadfan! Thanks!
I'll dig more into it 😀
Just remember that by default, WfW and Win9x clients can't directly connect to Windows 7 file and printer sharing. You usually have to disable NTLMv2 authentication among other things.
