[RubyLaser]

Can someone out there please advise me on how to print in dos? I have an ibm xt connected to an Epson xp 1050 and i managed to get the printer to work in xp, but when i took the printer back to the xt machine and tried to print there it just gives a device timeout message in gwbasic and wont let me print.

Any help in this regard would be greatlty appreciated!

[JohnWill]

Printing in MS-DOS requires each application to have drivers for the specific printer you're using, it's not like using Windows. What printers does the application you're running support? If it has no specific print driver support, all you can print is plain text, and the printer has to understand that's what's coming. Some printers used to have emulation modes for common printers, but that's been a looooooooooong time ago, don't know if any current printers do that.

I'd recommend you print to a serial port and capture it on a more modern machine with something like HyperTerminal and you can print it on a Windows machine.

[RubyLaser]

I managed to find an old dos book and in it said that you have to declare the device in the config.sys, which i did (if remember correctly wrote device=c:\dos\printer (4208,385,2), my numbers could be wrong but that was basically it). But alas still did not print, the printer is a Seikosha sp 2000, I dont need to actually print but in order for this program to run it uses the lprint command in gwbasic and if it doesnt print it throws an error 27 msg. All I am trying to do is get the program to work, but I am having endless battles with it. Do you know if there is any way of viewing a .bas file on modern machines that will let me print it out so I can at least read it.

Thanks

[JohnWill]

You should be able to save the .BAS file in plain text mode, which will allow you to open it with NOTEPAD or any other plain text editor. Like I said, it's not som somple as putting some numbers in CONFIG.SYS, you actually have to have the printer supported as part of the application. That printer will emulate an Epson FX-80, which was pretty common back in the DOS days.