Most devices of this type seem to be designed to go in the other direction - connecting a modern PC to an old Centronics printer. There are USB adapters and network adapters for this. But these all go in one direction (modern interface supplies data, Centronics just blindly receives data) whereas you need something that listens on a Centronics interface and then when data is received, passes it over to a USB/network printer.

Probably you'd have to build something yourself with a microcontroller. Or a simpler solution might be a Raspberry Pi with two USB adapters - one to speak IEEE1284/Centronics to receive data from your PC, and the other USB cable to communicate with a printer.

Of course the bigger problem is that you would still have to find a printer with a compatible protocol. It's all well and good to get your data to arrive at the printer, but if the printer only accepts data produced by a custom Windows driver, then you're not going to be able to produce any output. Finding a printer that can understand PostScript or PCL probably means it has a Centronics connector anyway. Remember all those DOS programs that shipped with hundreds of printer drivers? Probably none of them work with any modern printer.

Linux has the GhostScript/Foomatic system to handle this - taking standard PostScript/PCL code and converting it into whatever format the printer requires, but there are still many printers it doesn't work with because they use some proprietary protocol that the printer manufacturer won't share.

So I think even if you can get "dir > prn" to send the data to a printer, you'll still have to find a printer that can understand plain text input like that.

Thanks for the answer. I'm really not tech savvy about printers, it's probably the PC peripheral i know less, which is to say almost nothing. So it seems really to be a rather complicated task.

Of course an alternative would be either to get an old printer which then has its own problems like finding suitable toner or ink cartdriges. I'm sure there are modern printers with centronics/parallel, i went to our local court justice service where my parents live in Portugal to register nationality and Portuguese citizen card for my son, and i noticed the printers they used were modern had RJ45, USB and centronics and for some reason computers were all connected to the printers exclusively by parallel to centronics cabling.

I think as you've suspected in your first post, a lot of office printers still come with the Centronics connector. There must still be demand for it out there. Even new photocopiers support it, but sometimes with a connector I have not seen before (it looks a bit like a small SCSI HD50 connector.)

If you get a really old dot matrix printer, the ribbon winds itself back and forth forever, so you might be able to take it apart and re-ink it when the printing starts getting faded 😀

Here's a few hardware options:
1. http://www.epapersign.com/products/52-products1/lpt2usb
http://www.jacobi-shop.com/xtcommerce/product … er-adapter.html

2. https://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~heha/bastele … /lpt2usb.en.htm

Your guess is as good as mine as far as compatibility. Generally speaking I might tell you to avoid mutifunction printer/scanner/copiers, but that's just based on a hunch and may have no standing in reality.

Software options:
Besides this, if your "Pure DOS" machine already has a USB port or if you have the capability of adding a PCI USB interface (there's also ISA USB but it's QUITE rare and that may add significant compatibility issues to overcome), then you may be able to mess around with either Bret Johnson's USB printer drivers (free): http://bretjohnson.us/
Or the DOSUSB driver package (65 Euros/license): http://www.georgpotthast.de/usb/ (which from the looks of things may be more mature)

Weird adapters were a hobby and interest of mine for a while. 😁

You can do it with a RPi and some handy work with a FT245R and port capture software.

Hardware: https://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~heha/bastelecke/PC/LptCap/

Sample Windows port capture application (appears to do limited ESC/P emulation): https://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~heha/hs/freew.html#SPE

Of course what you do with the data depends on the source.

At home I have a B&W Laserprinter from 2005ish, every now and then my Dad uses it on his (really really old computer, from like 1993), tho it has Win 3.1 on it, my Dad's software is DOS only. It connects with a regular old Printer Cable. The printer has both parallel and USB, so it works fine.

I never understood how my Dad does this without DOS drivers, but it works.

"Intelligent" printers with PCL, ESC/P2, etc. can print text without any drivers from a parallel port.

NJRoadfan wrote:

You can do it with a RPi and some handy work with a FT245R and port capture software. […]
Show full quote

You can do it with a RPi and some handy work with a FT245R and port capture software.

Hardware: https://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~heha/bastelecke/PC/LptCap/

Sample Windows port capture application (appears to do limited ESC/P emulation): https://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~heha/hs/freew.html#SPE

Of course what you do with the data depends on the source.

NJRoadfan goes for the do-it-yourself solution, I go for the turnkey solution. And in both cases citing the same guy - love it 😁

I think we've given carlostex a lot to chew on, go team VOGONS! 😁

There are format utilities for DOS as well -- Postscript converters and Ghostscript for instance. Also, have a look at some of the printer drivers for WordPerfect for DOS.

Thanks everyone!! Stilleto posted quite some interesting adapters. The price is high but i guess it is understandable considering is not a mass produced product. i'll take a closer look at the options. One of the requirements of one of the adapters is that the printers must support PCL or PostScript...

I'm back looking on this. I think the best options to find a laser printer.

What do you guys think of this one? I'm gonna try to find one of these:

http://www.cnet.com/products/canon-lbp-660-pr … me-laser/specs/

LBP-660 seems to be primarily a GDI printer, with a mediocre PCL implementation.

Personally, I like Brother's low-end lasers, although make sure you get one that actually claims PCL (or BR-Script, which is PostScript) support.

bhtooefr wrote:

LBP-660 seems to be primarily a GDI printer, with a mediocre PCL implementation.

Personally, I like Brother's low-end lasers, although make sure you get one that actually claims PCL (or BR-Script, which is PostScript) support.

Do you have any model in mind? I've checked several models and only found the HL-5140, which has PCL6 emulation and Centronics port.

Ah, I didn't realize the low-end ones dropped the parallel port, I've got an old HL-2070N (which has a few other tricks up its sleeve that the newer printers lack - IBM ProPrinter XL and Epson FX-850 emulation, in addition to PCL5e).

Maybe try looking at a used LaserJet III or 4? Toner is easily available and will be for quite a while. These were so extremely common and durable that there's still quite a few of them happily printing away. Compatible with everything.

I've been researching this and i've found a heap of older Brother printers that support DOS by emulation of PCL, PostScript 2/3, Epson FX-850 and IBM ProPrinter XL.

All is needed is to have DOS drivers for the corresponding older printers with said language support.

Here is the list i made:

Mono Laser Printers

Brother HL-1250
Brother HL-1270
Brother HL-1450
Brother HL-1470
Brother HL-1650
Brother HL-1670N
Brother HL-1850
Brother HL-1870N
Brother HL-2070N
Brother HL-2460
Brother HL-5070N
Brother HL-5140 -- only supports PCL6
Brother HL-5150D
Brother HL-5170DN
Brother HL-5240
Brother HL-5250DN
Brother HL-5280DW
Brother HL-5340D
Brother HL-5350DN
Brother HL-5440D
Brother HL-6050D
Brother HL-6050DN
Brother HL-7050N

Color Laser Printers

Brother HL-2600CN
Brother HL-2700CN
Brother HL-3450CN
Brother HL-4050CDN -- only PCL6 and BR-Script3

All of these Printers have a Centronics port, so they should work with very little effort.

I've found myself a couple of HL-5240's, so i should be covered. I will be using my Turbo XT for my text processing needs. Still not sure which word processor to use, Wordstar vs WordPerfect but i have a feeling WordPerfect is better.

bhtooefr wrote:

LBP-660 seems to be primarily a GDI printer, with a mediocre PCL implementation.

Agreed. The LBP-660 is a pain to get working under anything other than the Windows versions it was designed for, and therefore one of the models to avoid at all costs.

einr wrote:

Maybe try looking at a used LaserJet III or 4? Toner is easily available and will be for quite a while. These were so extremely common and durable that there's still quite a few of them happily printing away. Compatible with everything.

Laserjet 1200, maybe? Compact, cheap, a real workhorse and thanks to USB AND Centronics, really works with everything.

Can't go wrong with any old Laserjet.

oerk wrote:

Laserjet 1200, maybe? Compact, cheap, a real workhorse and thanks to USB AND Centronics, really works with everything.

Can't go wrong with any old Laserjet.

The Brother website claims that several DOS drivers can be used with Brother printers that support PCL and BRScript (PostScript) can use drivers for Laserjet II, III and 4 printers. Considering that a lot of Brother printers even support the Epson Fx-850 and the IBM ProPrinter XL i'd say these printers are good options to support old DOS legacy applications.

Classic DOS had some capability for redirecting printer output to the network. How, for example, did Netware do it? Can similar techniques be used to redirect to an LPD compatible print stream?