The Sinclair QL Forum

I was speaking with a user in London yesterday - he uses QPC2 and has 2 printers connected to his PC - a Canon connected to the parallel port and an Epson connected to a serial port.

He has used this setup in the past, but whilst he was able to print to the Canon, he was struggling with the Epson for some reason.

He tried : OPEN #3,ser1: PRINT #3,"Hello World": CLOSE #3

and nothing comes out of the Epson.

Change it to:
OPEN #3,par: PRINT #3,"Hello World": CLOSE #3

and the Canon prints merrily away.

Is there something he might be missing either on the PC or the QPC2 setup?

SER1 was pointing to COM1 in the QPC2 configuration panel.

Hi,
in about 99:9 percent of the cases where serial printing doesn't work, the problem is a broken or improper wired cable.

You can try from a WIndows CMD window whether a simple 'copy (somefile.txt) COM1' (8etter use a very short file) would make the printer tick.
If that doesn't work, it's not a QPC related problem

Regards,
Tobias

RWAP wrote:He tried : OPEN #3,ser1: PRINT #3,"Hello World": CLOSE #3
and nothing comes out of the Epson.

As someone else said, the usual serial printer problem is cabling, and trying to print from Windows to the serial printer would confirm whether the setup is OK and if it's some QL side problem.

Many years ago, I had a printer which would lose the last page unless ended with a form feed, so it might be worth adding BPUT #3,12 before the CLOSE to try that. Or, of course, if that works he can then use one of the 'form feed at end' device name qualifiers (look them up in the Serial Ports part of the SMSQE/QPC manual.

Dilwyn