VB Forum / General 2 / July 2008

OK, Gurus, my thanks in advance for any insight.

There are a couple of shareware programs out there (DOS2USB, and DOSPRN)
that will allow printing to a Windows printer from a legacy DOS application.
In my case I wrote a boat rental application in Cobol back in the '80's, and
now the customer wants to migrate it to a new PC that has USB but no
parallel or serial ports. I've written a VB version of it, but it's a
complex application and has not been tested nearly enough to go live.

I bought DOS2USB, but got burned by the not-too-good-English-speaking sales
folks overseas, but that's another story.

I must have too much time on my hands, 'cause I want to write my own
utility. An easy way would be to create a text file in the DOS application,
look for its existence, then read and print it from a VB program, and
finally delete it, but I consider this a sloppy solution to the problem.

I've Googled myself silly, and cannot find a method of doing this the hard
way. The question: Is there a way, and I'm sure there is, to read the print
data from a register or DOS printer memory area (if this exists), into a
string in VB? If so, is it accessed a bit at a time, or a byte at a time, or
would I be lucky enough to be able to read a line to a CRLF? Is it at 378H?
Can anyone give me a brief code example of how to loop through this data?
Once into a VB string, it's a piece of cake, but I have no clue how to get
to that point.

Thanks.

John