[Dork.]

I'm helping someone with a batch of hardware and software they bought second-hand for a business. Stuff like bar-code scanners, receipt printers, and POS-IM POS software.

I've got a Star TSP600 serial receipt printer in front of me right now, and I can't get the darn thing to work. STAR has a CUPS driver for Mac OS X which supports all interfaces except serial. I'm aware that RS-232 printers have dubious support in OS X to begin with, so I figured that's probably the reason the driver doesn't support it. I thought that if I mucked around with CUPS enough, I can probably get it to work with this driver.

I downloaded the CUPS Serial Print Enabler here, and CUPS does see my USB to serial interface. And the hardware test page from the printer (no driver required) lists its port speed as 9600-8-N-1 with DTR handshaking. But when I enter all this into CUPS, no luck.

Has anyone here done this before, and can you give me some insight as to what I'm doing wrong? This was supposedly bought from someone who had all this hardware working under OS X with POS-IM, so I'm sure I'm jsut missing something somewhere....

[Dork.]

Nobody knows? Perhaps I should ask this in the Unix forum, since it's CUPS-related....

[Nivag]

Not sure about the serial to usb convertor thing but i've used the Star TSP600 USB printer without any problems as a POS receipt printer.

I can't remember what the actual POS software was called. I've emailed the company i used to work for to find out.

Not much help to you, but least you know the USB version works.

[Dork.]

Thanks for the info. I am aware that the STAR USB printers are quite nice on OS X, but that's not what we have.

I guess another question I have, though, is would this printer appear just like a normal printer in OS X? That's what I've been assuming -- that I need to set it up in CUPS to look like any other printer -- but maybe that's incorrect....

[Nivag]

Without derailing the other thread, yes it appeared as normal in the print queue. Most amusing when trying to print a A4 invoice and having it print out on the Star by mistake.

EDIT
Just remembered the POS software they used - it was made by a company called Hansa

HansaWorld - Integrated ERP and CRM

Apple (UK and Ireland) - Business - Bringing the Mac to Account