So this one is a challenge, under no illusions here but I'll give it a go. Let me lay out the situation first
There is a very old printer that is pretty cool. Its made by Polaroid, and it prints on actual Polaroid film. Thats right, any digital image can be printed straight onto film. There is another company doing this now called The Impossible Project, but their system involves using the screen of an iPhone. bleh..
The problem is, this printer only works under Win9x (assuming ME too). I have several of these new, in the box and would like to get them going. Furthermore, there is also an earlier Parallel version of the printer, which works flawlessly under a win98 VM.
The situation:
Win 8.1 running WS 10
Very clean win98 install with usb working great, mass storage and other usb attached items show up just fine.
When I connect the usb Printer, windows detects > Asks for drivers > Installs fine > Reboot
Back on desktop > Printers > print test page > pause > printer driver generated USB communication error (not general windows error)
I can see vmware attempting to communicate with the printer, but fails within 5 seconds. I've tried upgrading win98 to USB2, and using multiple different old school USB cards. VIA and NEC with less results with VIA and same as described with NEC.
I know the printer will work, as the parallel version does. I think its something that VMware is/isn't doing as expected. Is there anyone with ideas, or some sort of debuging we can do. This is total gold star material. I'll even send the person who figures it out a printer (i've got quite a few!) if you can get this going for me.
I've also tried an additional USB hub between the computer and the device. This produced significant delay from print to failure and quite a bit of extra USB traffic before it failed. Interesting but in the end the same result.
Tried Win ME - Same result.
One thing I've not tried is straight vanilla win98. There is no mention of SE in the printer docs, and I know USB was a major sore spot for windows of this era. Makes me wonder if this driver pre-dates SE and was designed to work with previous 3rd party USB implementations.
thanks!
-Cory
Accepted Solutions
Problem solved - Virtual Box worked straight out. Something in their USB implementation is different.
Problem solved - Virtual Box worked straight out. Something in their USB implementation is different.