I'm running Windows XP, but my printer (NEC Superscript 870) isn't really supported under XP (90% of the time I print, I get jumbled/corrupted print-outs, even though I've tried a dozen different drivers for it). No, it's not the printer or the parallel port cable, since printing works fine under Win95/98 (with the respecitve OS drivers).

One of my options is of course to just use VMware with Win95/98 as the guest OS, and print from XP to a shared printer on VMware. However, I'd rather not have VMware running all the time just to print stuff (it eats up at least 32 megs of RAM).

I was wondering if anyone had any advice on what I could do. I looked into making a printer miniport driver, but it seems like a steep learning curve for something that I'm not even sure would help. I'm relatively sure that the problem lies in the driver, and not the spooler (no problems printing to .PDF files). Any advice on how to troubleshoot this, even if it does require programming a "filter" for the existing drivers? (Of course, NEC doesn't provide any help)

I have the same problem with XP and a WinWriter 150c, by Lexmark. Contacted the manf and all they will say is "no driver available". I am pretty sure this means that my printer is so old that they don't consider it worth supporting under XP. But it's a nice printer and I am fond of it.

I was/am hesitant to tell XP to go ahead and use it anyway, given the GarbagePrint and/or SystemMalfunction warnings.

Any help on this would be appreciated.

(Maybe we need a new forum here on resolving old stuff....nah, then we'd pick up a lot of DOS stuff.)

Sarge

Hi,

Since I have been a victim of the "no updated drivers" problem,
I would just start trying them all until I found one that would work better then the default driver that windows installs.

After searching I have found 2 suggestions to your problem.
Use minolta OMS 8L or, HP laserjet IIP printer drivers.

Good Luck,

Woodmann

thanks woodmann. yes, google gave me the link to that page too. those were two of the drivers that were included in the dozen or so i've tried, to no avail.

@disavowed

I found with my old printer that I could tell it to emulate a different standard IE HP Design jet or Postscript etc.

Anyway just a thought

thanks for the reply, but no luck with either:
i tried every deskjet printer driver bundled with xp, none of them worked.
i tried postscript, but all it printed out was the ascii postscript commands (i guess my printer's not postscript compatible??)

looks like i may have to use vmware after all.. ughhhh

anyone else have any ideas?

Errrrrrrrrrrrr..............

Dont hate me

WinXP DDK perhaps ?

I assume you tried
http://www.computergripes.com/NecSuperScript870.html
(At the bottom)

It seems to emulate the HP LaserJet IIP protocol. So install the HP Laserjet IIP driver and try that.

Catch Ya

yeah, i went to that site awhile ago. as i said to woodmann, that driver didn't work for me.

i would think that coding a printer driver would require proprietary knowledge of the printer's internals. pretty much the reason why there's no such thing as a generic (non-postscript) printer driver for windows!!
if i'm wrong here in my understanding, please let me know