2400 IMS - printing question

[peterdstuart]

Hey all, recently took over management of a NEC neax 2400 IMS with hotel/motel installed. I'm an IT guy who's never worked in telephones but I'm figuring most of it out reading manuals and combing through posts on here. We have MAT command running on a Windows 95 computer. We don't have a printer installed but I have several reports I'd like to print, which leads to a two part question... Do I have any options with MAT running on this '95 box to get print outs? I have plenty of computers available, I'm thinking about trying moving the MAT software over to a Win7 machine and purchasing a USB to Serial converter and attempting to run that way, does anyone see any issues with that? I understand there's PCPro out there, how would I go about obtaining that and would it work with my system? Thanks in advance!

 

[belevedere]

PCPro works back to ICS rev 5. Go to command DISS, M (main memory) and see what software version you have. PCPro is free to NEC dealers. Contact your vender for a copy. Since your MAT is running on WIN 95, it is a DOS version which will not transfer over to WIN 7 easily if at all. Your best bet is to connect an old dot matrix printer to the WIN 95 PC and run your print outs.

 

[OzzieGeorge]

An old program we used to use was print2file to get info into a useable format. however it has been so long since I used it! it may have been called prin2file or some other abbreviation, try googling it!

 

[PFD45]

A quick fix might be to run an old DOS utility called prn2file.com that redirects your printer output to a text file.

 

[OzzieGeorge]

Great minds think alike! like your spelling better than mine!

 

[PFD45]

I was a minute late!
The server must be on your side of the dateline?

 

[peterdstuart]

Ok, I've got the prn2file utility, I've tried running it on top of windows, but I suspect I need to run it, then MAT, strictly in DOS? Any tips/suggestions that might help me out with that?

I was also thinking of running the MAT software on a dos emulator like DOSBOX, has anybody tried that? I'll give it a shot and report back.

 

[PFD45]

It's been a while but I think I used to open a command prompt, type: prn2file filename.txt then start the MAT commands.
When you exit the MAT commands your reports should be in your text file.

 

[peterdstuart]

That's fantastic, thank you so much. This will help me out with documenting 20+ years of no documentation! So many open LENS and unused DIDS, stations, etc