Ape Apps

So I've never been too much of a gamer, as I've always had more fun creating games than actually playing them. However my wife and son DO play games quite a bit (mostly Minecraft, but my son also likes some Xbox games), and a few months ago we decided to put together a small gaming YouTube channel just for the heck of it. And thus, HANGAR Cooperative Gameplay was born.

Ok, so I know that most people haven't even thought about a Dot Matrix printer since the late 1980's. Personally though, I have always been a fan of Dot Matrix printers, primarily for their superior durability, longevity, and low cost to operate. Anybody who owns a printer, whether it's an Inkjet or a Laser, is well aware of the outrageous cost for ink and toner, sometimes being even more expensive than the actual printer itself. This is why at home, whenever I am printing something non-critical, I tend to use my old Dot Matrix printer, an Epson LX-800 from 1987.

I have an old dot matrix printer (Epson LX-800) set up on an LPT port on a Windows 10 machine. I can print fine from Windows, but it uses graphics mode, takes forever, and the quality is not that great. I've always wanted to be able to print to this printer using the built in fonts (both draft and NLQ) but nothing I could find on Windows really supports it in an elegant way. So the other day I was updating my Ape Apps Launcher application, and decided that I would implement my own solution for printing to this printer, so that I could at least use it the way I want to in my own applications.