Connecting a serial cash drawer with windows 8.1

I am trying to get an old serial cash drawer working with Sambapos4 running on Windows 8.1. The cash drawer itself was working fine under a previous system (not Sambapos) with Windows XP.

I have configured a port printer to COM1

and set up the cash drawer actions etc as per @emre’s tutorial - Using Cash drawers

with printer template

But I am getting nothing on any of the pins of the serial port.

Device manager in Windows 8.1 says COM1 as “working properly”.

Does anybody have any suggestions as to what I am doing wrong?