Printing on a legacy DOS program hosted on a VM

Question

I work in a high school IT office. From the 90s through 2002, we used a DOS program called AES to manage electronic student records (grades, attendance, transcripts). We moved the application over to a virtual server about 12 years ago when we decommissioned its server.

I have worked here for 5 years and this is the first time that a student from that era has requested a transcript and we don't have the paper copy. So... I muddled my way through the menus and figured out how to print the transcript. But the application requires a printer attached to actually print the transcript. It errors out and hangs without a printer. We have a printer attached through RDP, which works for native Windows apps, but not this system.

Is there a way to fake the DOS application to see the RDP printer as LPT1?

Answer 1

So here's how I fixed it...

1. shared the printer on the VM
2. edited the batch file that launched the DOS application to have these commands:

net use lpt1 \\vmname\printername

3. Rebooted
4. Went into the application's (minimal) printer setup area and was able to get it to send a test page

Only after those specific steps would the student files print out.