Parallel Passthrough Windows 8.1

[rainfly]

Another Update:
I was able to get it to print on a Windows 8 host! I went in deep and made sure EVERYTHING was clear on the port... drivers etc.

So I brought it out of our test environment and into the live Win8 machine again and.... no dice.

The same environment in both computers and it just doesnt work.

I checked every possible area to ensure that there was NOTHING on the LPT3 port on the host. Clean uninstall of all local print drivers. Nothing on LPT1-3.

Now I am at a complete loss. I did the setup on the live machine as cleanly as possible, system restarts after each big step and constantly double checking that the port was clear.

Could it be that I need a printer driver on the host for the print job to go through it?

[mpack]

I can't think why that would be necessary. The port might need to be woken up from power sleep mode, but I'd expect the device driver to take care of that.

[rainfly]

I can't think why that would be necessary. The port might need to be woken up from power sleep mode, but I'd expect the device driver to take care of that.

You seem to be the local Parallel Passthrough Guru, am I wasting my time in this project? Is this kind of inconsistency something I should expect with any parallel passthrough setup?
I mean, this is just the test before the real test which is that security dongle.

[mpack]

I don't know how you got the impression that I'm the parallel goto guy. Yes, I wote the tutorial, but it contains common knowledge plus a few details I got fed up of looking up every time some noob asked the howto question.

I don't know that you're wasting time on the parallel port per se, but as I say in the tutorial, it's a virtually undocumented and low priority feature. Also, as a general principle I feel that controlling physical hardware just isn't the forte of a virtual machine. The clue is in the name, as they say.