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DOS 3.3 and printing

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First post, by Skip94

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Hi all
I'll start by saying I'm very much a novice with DOS, I grew up in the W98 and XP era, so I'm still learning.
A couple times now I have tried to get my IBM 5152 printer working through DOS with no success. This is mostly just for a basic test of the parallel port on various PCs I've been restoring.
I know the printer works, as in Windows 95, I can print no issues.
But no idea what I'm doing in DOS. From the googling I have done, I am just doing "PRINT C:\xxxxx.txt /D:LPT1". Xxxxx.txt then shows in the print queue, but nothing from the printer. "Dir > LPT1" also does nothing.
Checkit complains about the printer not responding.
This could be faulty hardware, but this is the 2nd time this has happened, so I wonder if its something silly that I'm missing.
Any thoughts, or more tests to do?
Cheers
Andrew

Reply 1 of 3, by jakethompson1

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It should be fairly plug and play so long as the printer has paper and the select/online light is on.
Are you sure you don't have multiple parallel ports in this machine seeing as it is DOS 3.3? The MDA video card also has a parallel port for example.

Reply 2 of 3, by Skip94

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And there is my stupid mistake!
Of course theres a LPT port on the IBM MDA card I'm testing everything with. Plug the printer into that and it all springs to life!
I don't know how I hadn't thought about it before, I've spent a while trying to sort this out. Now just to work out how to disable it, as I want to test some other LPT ports, mostly on a 286 board I have, with them built in.
Andrew

Reply 3 of 3, by Jo22

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COPY TEXT.TXT PRN

PRN is the standard alias for printers. Default is LPT1, I think.
AUX was a similar thing (from the CP/M days). It equals COM1.

Edit: The LPT1 on a Hercules clone is at address $3BC.
Many BIOSes will favour it over $378 and $278.
That means that the LPT ports are shifted.
The former LPT1 at 378h will become LPT2..

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