Anybody out there communicating with cash drawers via ZTERM under Vista (either by "printing" a command to it, or using serial passthrough)? I've got a report of it not working, but need to rig up a cable to make a test for myself.

My suspicion is that the problem is related to passthrough printing, i.e. that the driver being used for the "printer" doesn't support passthrough. Otherwise, this would suggest that you couldn't print at all from ZTERM / Vista, and I think I would have heard a complaint about that by now.

Sorry for the delay - my Vista laptop naturally had no "regular" serial ports and my existing USB-serial adapter didn't seem to work. So I got a new one, installed it, and created a cable to hook my Vista laptop to my XP laptop over a serial connection.

At first I had trouble getting ZTERM to connect. I kept getting the message "Invalid port or port in use". However, after changing the ZTERM launch properties to run as administrator and in XP compatibility mode, I was then able to connect proceed, such that whatever I typed in ZTERM on one end of the connection would display on the other, and vice versa. OK, so the serial port works. Now, to print to it...

So I disconnected ZTERM from the Vista side, then created a new network connection to another computer (but left ZTERM connected to the XP side to simulate the printer/cash drawer). Next I created local printer, attached to the COM4 port (which is what my USB-to-serial adapter created). The Print a Test Page option display a bunch of test messages in the ZTERM window as expected.

Then I created the following test program on the computer to which I had the Vista ZTERM network connection set up:

? "Testing output via aux port to 'cash drawer'
? tab(-1,82);
? "hello world";
? tab(-1,83);
? "done"
end

I set up the ZTERM Configuration..Printer option to print to the Generic / Text Only printer that I had defined and ran the program.

Voilà, "hello world" appears as expected on the target ZTERM window (the one simulating the printer).

Conclusion: outputting string commands to a cash drawer under ZTERM/Vista is possible, just as it was under XP, using a Generic / Text Only printer driver. The only obstacle I could see was the issue with needing to run as Administrator. That's definitely a pain. However, I went back and removed that checkbox option and now it runs fine. It appears that that was only necessary to open the port directly, but since in the final configuration we are letting the printer driver communicate with the port, there is no need for special privileges.