[RESOLVED] Okidata Microline 184 Turbo

[Delbruc]

Just purchased this thing and am running it a machine to print checks with (Win95, p1-200, 48 Mb ram). The Oki dot matrix printers don't give you drivers, they tell you to use the drivers from Win95 disk. Sure... (just lazy if you ask me :-) OK using the Oki Microline 184 IBM Turbo driver the thing works fine, EXCEPT that it *always* prints in NLQ mode no matter what the settings in the control panel, it just switches to NLQ before each print job. So... we switch to a "generic text" driver and it works fine that way EXCEPT that it no longer recognises the custom paper length (8.5" wide X 7" long) Now here's the wierd part... IF I switch back to the win95 driver, re-accept the custom paper size, print a test page (in NLQ of course), switch back to the generic driver, re-accept the the custom paper size, switch the printer to normal (non NLQ), and print it works fine with the custom paper size and non-NLQ mode until the next time it needs to print. The printer remains ON 24/7, so its not reseting itself. It just seems that with the Win95 driver there is no way to set it to print in anything but NLQ AND the generic driver refuses to keep the custom paper sizes in memory. Anyone seen this before? Never came accross this myself. I may just end up sending this thing back and getting an Epson or someting else... I would appreciate any feedback you could provide! Thanks!

Del

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"You can't win the game with government cheese." --The Great Brain Robbery -- Cheapass Games

[mikevm]

You might have more luck using an Okidata ML320 or similar. Back when I was a tech that's what we always used for checks very succesfully, no problems

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Plug and Play
or
Plug and Pray?

[Sowulo]

This is like going back to the dark ages....most of those old impact printers had dip switches to set things like default print quality. Additionally, Oki's usually came in two 'flavors'--plain Oki and IBM Oki. It's important that you install the correct driver between the two options...

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Women's view of Men: All your attention, time, and money are belong to us....

[Delbruc]

As a follow up on this...
I actually got someone at Oki to pick up the phone so I could ask some questions. The guy I spoke with reccommeded using the IBM Graphics printer driver. This one works perfectly. It seems odd to me that a company won't publish thier *own* driver, but like tech god swolo sez... this is bronze age stuff... Thanks for the input guys!