I'm playing around with a program that controls a small "design cutter" - it's basically a plotter that connects via the parallel port.
There is some Windows CAD software that knows about the plotter and sends commands to it, as far as I can tell in one of two ways:
1) Through a printer driver. It doesn't seem too bothered about the details of the driver though. I'm assuming that one would normally use a generic, text-only Windows driver. This method, apparently, has the advantage of the driver buffering the output
2) The second method is a direct connection to LPT1.
With Wine, in the first case I get a message in a dialog box saying the call to "StartDocPrinter" failed and
fixme:winspool:StartDocPrinterA (hPrinter=0x1, Level=0x1, pDocInfo=0x408a28dc): stub
to stdout.
In the second case I get a dialog saying "LPT1 was not found" and
fixme:dosfs:DOSFS_OpenDevice device open L"LPT1" not supported (yet) err:file:CreateFileW Couldn't open device L"LPT1"!
to stdout.
Is this a config issue? I'm assuming that is should be easier for me to get the second method working.