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I have a scenario with a printer on a Windows 8 machine that needs to be shared to a FreeDOS instance that is running on same said machine via VirtualBox.

Initially I'd hoped that there was a printer sharing feature that would be similar to VMware or Parallels, however I'm not really finding a "convenient" option. This printer will be frequently used to print from within Windows itself, but then this good old DOS program needs to also be able to print every once in a while.

I was thinking that perhaps the best option would be to enable network sharing of the printer in Windows and then attempt to connect the networked printer to a virtual parallel port in the FreeDOS instance somehow.

I've got TCP/IP networking working just fine in the FreeDOS instance, but now it's a matter of grabbing the shared printer port to some virtual lpt I'd assume.

One other thought that crossed my mind is that I may need to acquire some software on the Windows side to provide a more universal input for DOS that will therefore allow a simple DOS app character spew vs needing some heavier driver processing.

Any ideas on how to accomplish this?

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I'm not familiar with FreeDOS networking, but if you can do "net use" to a shared network-drive you should also be able to do: 

Net use lpt1 \\server\printershare

Your MS-DOS application must support printing to network-printers though.
If the MS-DOS applications tries to manipulate the LPT hardware chip directly this is not going to work. If it accesses LPT1 as a file this will work.

There is no need to provide drivers or such on the Windows side for this. It will happily pass the raw bytes received from the DOS client directly to the printer. (Alternatively you can setup the printer in Windows as "Generic/Text Only" printer to be absolutely sure Windows won't touch the print-jobs.)

If your DOS application insists on controlling the printer-hardware by itself the only way to make this work is (AFAIK) to have a real parallel printer on the hosts system and map that parallel port directly onto the FreeDOS VM. (It won't be usable from the hosts system at the same time though!)

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  • I too thought of going down that path, but the net command, as I recall, was introduced by MS in Windows 3.11 for Workgroups or Windows 95 and is not available in pure DOS (neither in FreeDOS).
    – ylluminate
    Commented May 22, 2015 at 20:02
  • @ylluminate MS delivered NET with the 3.11 "For Workgroups", that's true, but before that several 3rd party network-clients (E.g. PC-NFS, Netware) already provided their own version. I have no idea what that TCP stack you have on FreeDOS exactly delivers, but if it includes a SMB/CIFS client you should have NET or something else ("mount" maybe?) that serves the same purpose.
    – Tonny
    Commented May 23, 2015 at 12:50

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