Emulating EPP printer

[usenet]

Hello

I have a piece of productionmachinery which prints to an older Oki
Microline Dot matrix printer via a standard EPP/ECP cable.

What I would like to do, is have a Windows box emulate this printer
and have the output show on the screen instead. Should I simply
connect the equipment to the parallel port on the PC, run
Hyperterminal and see the output or is it likely that this requires
some sort of printerdriver emulation ? From what I can understand, the
connection is a RS232.

Can any harm come to parallel equipment, when connecting it to a PC ?

Thanks in advance, any insight will be appreciated !

Johannes

 

[Bob Headrick]

Hello

I have a piece of productionmachinery which prints to an older Oki
Microline Dot matrix printer via a standard EPP/ECP cable.

What I would like to do, is have a Windows box emulate this printer
and have the output show on the screen instead. Should I simply
connect the equipment to the parallel port on the PC, run
Hyperterminal and see the output or is it likely that this requires
some sort of printerdriver emulation ? From what I can understand, the
connection is a RS232.

Check things a bit more. There were Oki Microline printers that had an
RS-232 interface. If the equipment used RS-232 output you could connect it
to a windows PC with a null modem cable connecting the two. In this case a
terminal program could do what you want. On the other hand, if the
connection really is a parallel cable (ecp/epp) this will not work. It may
be possible to redirect the printer output to a serial (RS-232) port if the
production equipment uses DOS as an underlying operating system. It might
be possible in this case to use the DOS "Mode" command to redirect the
printer. It has been a long time, but the commands would look something
like:

Mode Com1:96,n,8,1
Mode lpt1=Com1

Can any harm come to parallel equipment, when connecting it to a PC ?

Yes, if you connect a parallel port to an RS-232 interface it is possible to
damage the parallel port. RS-232 is +/- 15V max, the TTL inputs on the
parallel port can handle about -0.8 to +5.5V max. Do not connect a rapallel
port to an RS-232 port.

Regards,
Bob Headrick, MS MVP Printing/Imaging

 

[Warren Block]

I have a piece of productionmachinery which prints to an older Oki
Microline Dot matrix printer via a standard EPP/ECP cable.

Not really such a thing as an EPP/ECP cable; those are modes of the
parallel port.

What I would like to do, is have a Windows box emulate this printer
and have the output show on the screen instead. Should I simply
connect the equipment to the parallel port on the PC, run
Hyperterminal and see the output or is it likely that this requires
some sort of printerdriver emulation ? From what I can understand, the
connection is a RS232.

Before doing anything, you need to find out exactly what you have. Is
it parallel or serial? If the cable has a DB9 connector on either end,
it's probably serial. Old stuff could have DB25 connectors, but so
could parallel.

If it is parallel, the easiest option is to convert it to serial.
Hardware adapters are available to do that.

Finding an appropriate serial cable can be difficult, and I usually end
up building them.

Once the data is in a form the PC can receive, you can choose an OS and
application to display the output.

Can any harm come to parallel equipment, when connecting it to a PC ?

Possibly, particularly if you're plugging a non-parallel cable into the
parallel port.

 

[usenet]

Not really such a thing as an EPP/ECP cable; those are modes of the
parallel port.


Before doing anything, you need to find out exactly what you have. Is
it parallel or serial? If the cable has a DB9 connector on either end,
it's probably serial. Old stuff could have DB25 connectors, but so
could parallel.

If it is parallel, the easiest option is to convert it to serial.
Hardware adapters are available to do that.

Finding an appropriate serial cable can be difficult, and I usually end
up building them.

Once the data is in a form the PC can receive, you can choose an OS and
application to display the output.


Possibly, particularly if you're plugging a non-parallel cable into the
parallel port.

Thanks a lot guys!

I will investigate further and share the results with you.