Printing Directly To Acrobat in Win98

[bostonman]

Printing to the network potentially kills two birds with one stone, getting the file off the scope onto the network and handling PDF conversion, but there are of course many ways to skin this cat. I assume you can set up such a print server using Windows too, I'm just not a Windows guy.

Well as I mentioned, I have a Raspberry Pi sitting around and that runs Linux. I don't know anything about servers or anything more in Linux that a GUI and basic commands though.

As for the comments about installing Win10(!?), I surely hope you're joking because Win98-era hardware is probably going to already be too slow for XP, and it being a scope means the DOS-based Win9x could be allowing scope software access to the hardware directly.

If you read further back, you'll see I stated that in order to upgrade the OS, the motherboard needs to be replaced. This scope is old, and, in my opinion, has many un-repairable points of failure due to obsolete components such as the hybrid chips. I can spend time and money trying to update the Windows portion of the scope, and eventually a component can fail that would make the scope unusable. In the end, I'd be stuck with a "computer" that I can't really use elsewhere.

As for the cost, not that a new motherboard is expensive, but I feel it's a waste of an expense based on what I stated above (and this assumes I can even find the scope software which seems obsolete too - I'm uncertain how others have done it but they have registered copies of Win10 and are understandably unwilling to provide an image).

Also, as far as I can tell, Windows plays a very small role in the the scope. Windows is there to automatically launch the scope software and handle providing drivers for hardware. The scope is outdated not because it's slow, but because it's Win98 based. I'm trying to find a printing solution that isn't a lengthy process because I may decide to print several waveforms while measuring a circuit, and a process that doesn't result in having to find another solution in a year because this one is outdated already.

I'm uncertain if a Raspberry Pi is the best solution because I would need to connect it to the scope each time, and then connect to the Pi to extract the files, however, I feel unless I find a piece of software that works on a barebones Win98 OS that prints to PDF successfully, this may be the only other option.

[magic]

IMO you should try that PS file printing trick.

I found some instructions:
http://www.sketchpad.net/postscript-printer-win98-1.htm
Not sure where the file is saved, hopefully you will figure it out

PS is a fairly standard format like PDF. Lots of software to view it or convert it to something else.

[bostonman]

I'll try this next.

The developer for Doro sent an email to me today. I don't know why the previous emails were returned as being unable to send.

In any case, I'm uncertain whether this will be resolved and I can use Doro, however, I guess this can be an option too.

[bostonman]

I tried basically the last program I could find - PDFCreator 0.9.3. I had downloaded it at the end of last week, however, I forgot I didn't try it because I was busy trying different versions of other programs.

Today I installed it without any issues and got a great PDF (see attached).

As of now, the scope boots Win98 without issues, the scope software initializes correctly, I have USB recognizing thumb drives, I can print to PDF, and all the repairs I did to the scope seems to have paid off since the measurements all seem accurate.

[Halcyon]

That's great! Your prints look really nice.

I'm glad we could all help. Thanks for sharing your process here for anyone else who might be looking to do something similar in the future.

[bdunham7]

Oooh, color!  Very nice work.  And it certainly looks Windows 98ish. 

[bostonman]

And it certainly looks Windows 98ish.

I think the Wn98ish gives it a good look - it's a reminder about what Windows once was. Compared to my other scopes that required I hold my phone to take a picture while holding a scope probe, I'll take a Win 3.1 look if need be.

I posted a question on the HP forum on trying to upgrade to XP. I didn't care to, but someone told me XP has more features. I'm not actively pursuing this, but, if I happen to stumble on an XP image, I may try it.

At this point, I have a working Win98 image, USB drivers, and a PDF printer, so worse case, I'd need to reinstall all this stuff.

Unfortunately I'm not getting many answers about XP, and I have more projects to work on, so this scope may sit as the perfectly good working scope it is - and I plan to use this scope to repair a C64. My goal is to measure a good C64, save waveforms, compare it to my bad one, and also have waveforms that I can provide to the C64 community so others can repair their units.