Have DOS Question

I am new to the forum so I thought I would start with a really odd question. Let me give you a little background.

My father-in-law has an old computer program that he uses for his finances and it is DOS based. It was created by some guy that he used to work with but no longer has contact with. Well this program worked fine until we installed a new printer that instead of using the COM1 port, uses a USB port. Well this program has a print file that has hard coded in the COM1 port and I am trying to figure out how to direct it to the USB port. Here is the code in the program

ECHO Setting the serial (RS232) port to:
\DOS\MODE COM1:2400,N,8,1

I tried changing the COM1 to USB001 but it just hangs up. The printer that I am trying to set up is an HP 1300C. If you experts could give me any help that would be appreciated. Oh by the way, I told him years ago that the program was way out of date.

Thanks in advance.

Mux

 

He may be out of luck. Can't think of a way to code it in the DOS enviornment. Seems more possible in a linux environment. Perhaps you'll have some success with DosBox et al.

 

I'm almost positive you can't use USB hardware in DOS. I would upgrade you software seeing as how DOS is very very very ancient.

 

Thanks for the reply's, I will try to get him onto something else. I guess I can always re-install his old printer just to get the data out. Either that or does anyone know if they make an adapter to make a USB printer work in the old world printer ports?

 

iirc, the transceiver would have to have software of some kind to convert the USB printer protocol to whatever stream the COM port would have gotten. They might be similar, but I doubt it.

The only thing I can think of that might be a possibility is using DosBox or DosEmu or some such and attempting to run some software to emulate the COM port but send all the data properly to the USB. *shrug* Otherwise, it's high time for an update and put him on a real OS