I've only a few things to add to this discussion about printing in USB -- most everything has already been said. But, I will summarize. USB support in the BIOS (for computers that even still have a BIOS) is usually limited to some subset of mouse, keyboard, and/or mass storage (disk drives). Some BIOSs will support all three, others only one or two. Most BIOSs also do NOT support "live" connects or disconnects of the USB devices --- the devices must be plugged in when you boot the computer or they will not be recognized by the BIOS at all. The same problem also exists with most (if not all) DOS USB drivers except mine. BTW, supporting live connections and disconnections in DOS is a pretty significant feature in itself -- DOS was never designed to support it and it's far from trivial to implement. I have never seen a BIOS that supports USB printers, serial ports, Ethernet NICs, joysticks, etc. I've also never seen a BIOS that has a way to "extend" it to add new types of USB devices or features. My driver architecture provides a way to add new types of USB devices. Specifically regarding printing, I do provide a USB print driver. But what it does is virtualize the printer port (usually LPT1) so that anything that DOS normally sends to LPT1 gets sent instead directly to the USB-attached printer. It does not do any type of protocol conversion -- it acts just like your printer is attached to a parallel centronics port. As has been noted, a lot of modern printers can't handle regular text being sent to them -- they don't know what to do with that. You have to send the data to the printer in a format the printer can understand. As has also already been noted, other than plain ASCII text the most common types of printer commands that some of the more "sophisticated" DOS programs can send out are Epson ESC/P, HP PCL3, and PostScript. Most modern printers won't accept any of those (including modern Epson and HP printers). Modern Brother printers are usually pretty good about accepting these "old" protocols, as may a few other brands, but that is far from universal. The other thing with USB is that it is pretty much an "all or nothing" scenario when it comes to BIOS support. That is, for each USB Host Controller, only one piece of software can be controlling it -- it must either be the BIOS or it must be an OS-specific driver. When you boot, the BIOS will normally be controlling the keyboard, mouse, and/or disks. If you have any other USB devices besides those (including printers), the BIOS completely ignores them and you cannot use them in DOS. You can install drivers for those other devices if drivers are available. But in order to install the DOS driver, you need to disconnect the BIOS. The good thing is that you can do this for each individual host controller. So, you can leave your mouse and keyboard and disks plugged into the host controller(s) that are being controlled by the BIOS and plug the other devices (printers or joysticks or whatever) into the host controller(s) that are not controlled by the BIOS. I also provide mouse and keyboard and disk drivers (though the disk driver admittedly doesn't work all that well) so you don't need to let the BIOS control anything if you don't want to. The problem with that scenario is that if your keyboard is being controlled by the BIOS, when you install a DOS driver for the host controller that keyboard is plugged into your keyboard will stop working (because it has been disconnected from the BIOS). So, you can't install the keyboard driver using the keyboard because you keyboard has stopped working. As mentioned earlier in this thread, the way around this is to run some sort of "LOADUSB.BAT" batch file that will install everything you need (including the USB keyboard driver) without ever needing to type anything on the keyboard. This is the way I need to set up my computers for testing. USB in DOS is challenging, but possible.
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