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dosbox-staging / dosbox-staging

DOSBox Staging is a modern continuation of DOSBox with advanced features and current development practices.
https://www.dosbox-staging.org/
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Printer Emulation #686

Open DanTheMan827 opened 4 years ago

DanTheMan827 commented 4 years ago

Hal 9000's mega builds had printer emulation, it would be nice if this feature could be added along with potentially making some improvements like printing to PDF and asking where to save instead of that being set in the config file

Added by @johnnovak :

eXoDOS currently uses DOSBox X for printer support.

Burrito78 commented 1 year ago

eXoDOS and eXoWin3x use printer emulation too, so yay.

johnnovak commented 1 year ago

We need a volunteer! And yeah, it would be cool 😎

Torinde commented 1 year ago

DOSbox-X supports printing as well.

Related: exoscoriae/eXoDOS/issues/3368, eXoDOS Staging project card

h-a-l-9000 (branch in this repo) supports color printer - (one of) the last of its features not implemented in any contemporary DOSbox fork (the other feature being Native IPX DOSBox-to-real PC, which I'm not sure if X supports already).

rderooy commented 1 year ago

This may be of interest. Epson ESC/P and ESC/P2 to PDF. https://github.com/RWAP/PrinterToPDF

johnnovak commented 1 year ago

This may be of interest. Epson ESC/P and ESC/P2 to PDF. https://github.com/RWAP/PrinterToPDF

Nice find @rderooy . But... depends on ImageMagick 😰

MaddTheSane commented 1 year ago

I know Boxer (Hi) has printer emulation. I don't know where it came from, but @alunbestor hooked it up to Boxer. You can see my fork for the changes he implemented.

Note that the last merge I did was in 2022… to a commit from 2021.

Grounded0 commented 10 months ago

Modified: Wed 10 Jan 2024 05:17:33 UTC

Does anyone have a list of DOS games with printing support?

Confirmed games with printing support:

Ravenloft: Stone Prophet (1995) Anvil of Dawn (1995) Menzoberranzan (1994) Ravenloft: Strahd's Possession (1994) Links LS: Legends in Sports - 1997 Edition (1996)

rderooy commented 10 months ago

There are a few games mentioned in this thread: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=36148

rderooy commented 10 months ago

First priority would be to add support for simply writing the LPT output to a file, this would already allow simple text output to be written to a file on the host, as well as allowing DOS applications to write more complex ESC/P, PCL or PostScript output, for which you may have external converters on the host.

Assuming actual printer emulation, I think the following printer types would be good candidates:

Text, ESC/P, ESC/P2 and PostScript are supported by DOSBox-X and 86Box. IBM ProPrinter is partly supported by DOSBox-X as part of the Epson printer emulation.

Grounded0 commented 10 months ago

Capturing the raw output coming to the LPT to a file would be fine. It doesn't need to be processed on our end in any way as it can be further processed on the host once it has the raw output.

See $ man cupsfilter for details.

mbenkmann commented 10 months ago

There should be the option to specify a program that would be started the first time something is written to LPT and gets the LPT data written to its standard input. This could be done by specifying the path with a "|" in front like "| command --to --execute".

Torinde commented 10 months ago

Does anyone have a list of DOS games with printing support?

At the links here you can see some and this is the longest list (which has some, but not all games mentioned in this and other linked Issues and Vogons posts).

Major group is "Textadventures with continous printer support"

rderooy commented 10 months ago

One potential issue to be aware of is that the text output would default to the codepage set in Staging (or a guest OS), which is likely to be a source of problems. So you would probably want both a "raw text" output and a "utf-8 text" output. Although the later would not work with a guest OS as Staging would not have any way of knowing the codepage in that case.

Torinde commented 7 months ago

More games with printing support:

Design Your Own Railroad, Design Your Own Train, EGA Mouse Paint, FaceMaker - Golden Edition, FBCOACH, Funny Face, The New Print Shop, The New Print Shop Companion, Stare-EO Workshop, and Alf's Party Kit

johnnovak commented 7 months ago

Core members interested in printing support, or non-core members interested in printing support and becoming core members, please step forward 😎

Realistically, we need a new guy for this extremely niche feature. Our current team has plenty to do, are the issues we're tackling are far more important.

Python-Exoproject commented 5 months ago

Couple more print games: Newsroom, The (1985) and Newsroom Pro, The (1989)