Uncreative Labs

Joined: 04 Jul 2006 Posts: 21 Location: Hollywood, Florida

MY OKI 182 WENT BELLY UP ABOUT 10 DAYS AGO AND I REPLACED IT WITH A NEW EPSON LX-300+II WHICH ARRIVED FRIDAY.

SO FAR I'M UNABLE TO GET IT TO PRINT. I'M USING THE DB25 M/F SERIAL CABLE THAT WORKED WITH THE OKI BUT I'M NOT SURE IF IT'S SUPOSED TO WORK WITH THE EPSON.

I'M RUNNING DOS 3.30. A FRIEND SAYS A DRIVER FOR THE EPSON ISN'T NEEDED BUT EPSON SAYS IT IS, IN FACT THEY HAVE A DRIVER YOU CAN DOWNLOAD IF YOU'RE RUNNING DOS 3.1 OR UP BUT I'D HAVE TO DO A LOT OF WORK TO GET IT ONTO A 5 1/4" FLOPPY.

ANYBODY OUT THERE HAVE ANY EXPERIENCE GETTING ONE OF THESE TO WORK WITH AN XT ???

THANKS FOLKS
OLDGOAT

Posted: Sun Sep 17, 2006 8:14 am

Are you posting on a keyboard without lower case keys? (If so, it's probably attached to an interesting computer and tell us about it!)

You may not need a printer driver to send a text file to COM1, but to do something like graphs (Lotus 123) you might. You'll have to try testing with the redirection operator.

echo autoexec.bat > com1

If I remember right, there was IBM emulation and Epson Emulation. They spoke different languages. My Citizen GSX-130 had a DIP switch for either one.

Joined: 04 Jul 2006 Posts: 21 Location: Hollywood, Florida

My computer is not unique and as you can see lower case keys did come as a standard feature on my keyboard.

It was not my goal to intentionally insult or annoy anyone. I can only attribute my lack of manners to the late hour and not remembering that computer etiquette considers capital letters a form of shouting.

Please accept my apology. I'll make every effort to insure it never happens again.

As to your response to my post; I'm not using it for graphs, just text. Thank you for the echo command. I'll give that a try.

Sincerely
Old Goat

Joined: 19 Apr 2006 Posts: 261 Location: WisConSin

LX-300+II isn't that a parallel printer? That unit may not be serial ready or 2 may have a different pinout on the serial port. DB25 serial had some oddities in comparision to DB9 and in fact a few implimentations actually made use of all 25pins for god knows what. If the manual lists it you may want to see what pinouts are going on on both printers to see if something funky might be needed

Good Luck

Joined: 19 Apr 2006 Posts: 261 Location: WisConSin

Oh, and a dot matrix should always be able to print plain old text from any source, if your print screen button gets rerouted to the com port see if it prints using that, or try to print from something very simple, if it doesn't work a pinout issue is probably in play

Joined: 04 Jul 2006 Posts: 21 Location: Hollywood, Florida

Ryan,
thanks for the response. it's programmable for either parallel, serial or usb .

you were right on the money suggesting the pinouts could be the problem. a friend who's the best field tech I know dropped by and in about 20 minutes fixed the problem.

seems older printers like the Oki 182 that went bad, used a "handshake" to communicate with the computer. The newer printers, like this Epson, use "xon/xoff". if I try to explain any more than that I'll start to show my ignorance.

The Oki used 6 pinouts; the Epson is now working with 3. The only drawback is the Epson doesn't know when it's out of paper. I'm just glad it works.

Thanks again for your suggestions, they were definitely on track and I'm sure would have led me to a solution.

You have a good night.

Bob