One more thing: DOS Dot Matrix Printers
One more thing... the system I was working on pertains to an emergency generator system and they had an Epson LX300PII dot matrix printer attached to the OIU which receives print commands from a sub routine in the LogicMaster program for the GE 9030 PLC... (insert: <BTW> this is a fantastic way to catch problems in the logic) ... well the printer had gone bad several years ago and they had replaced it, but NEVER got it working again. So they asked me to look into getting the new one working. I called Horner and John Shuttz was going to be out of the office for a while, so I called Epson. This is usually a waste of time, the new kids usually don't know anything about DOS, unless they are gamers. They told me they could help with Windows or MAC, well I wouldn't need their help with that... so I called Horner back and talked with John Shuttz and explained the problem of the printer just printing a short one line of gibberish.
ANSWER: Use a Terminal program and try and print to it. Adjust the COM settings until it prints to the terminal program correctly. I forgot about this option frankly... I already have one I use for DOS stuff (PCM MODULES and Barcode readers) which I like better than HyperTerminal... " Terminal v1.9b - 20060920ß by Br@y++" I tracked him down for this post so I could share the link for the free download: (always scan everything just in case)
https://sites.google.com/site/terminalbpp/
There are two versions I downloaded just now:
"Terminal20141030.zip" and "Terminal20100630.zip" I am using the one mentioned above. EDIT: It is a PORTABLE APP, only 336 K...
The problem ended up being the Parity was set at "ODD" and needed to be set at "NONE".
The printer had defaulted to:
Baud Rate: 19200BPS and needed to be set at 9600
Parity: ODD
Data Length: 8Bit
And there was no place to enter the rest of the settings that I retrieved from the OIU code print to text file, which were:
Stop Bits: 1
Handshake: None
Thanks again to everyone on the forum for all the years of service! May this help someone - someday!