🖨️ It took over a year and lots of help from Claude Code but I have now been able to create a real dot matrix printer on the web that prints from Windows 3.11 in your browser:
Here's the test page: https://pieter.com/assets/dosbox/serial-test/
I couldn't get the LPT1 port to work but COM2 did work (the dial up model already uses COM1), the JS receives the COM2 serial data (just raw print data) and then prints it
Next is to make the dot matrix printer better looking (kinda 3d like on pieter dot com) and have the paper also flowing in 3d out of the printer and integrate it on the http://pieter.com page
My idea was that it might work because we also capture the COM1 data (from the dial up modem) and send it to a Websocket as a dial up connection, so we should be able to capture the COM2 traffic too but I didn't know how, but now I do
IT WORKS!! 😊









