[Coco] CoCo Serial to Parallel

[Andrew]

> Message: 1
> Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:22:15 -0500
> From: "Chad H" <chadbh74 at hotmail.com>
> Subject: [Coco] CoCo Serial to Parallel
> To: <coco at maltedmedia.com>
> Message-ID: <COL103-DS200C7AE34109625396E5F4C8B90 at phx.gbl>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
> 
> Have been getting rid of some old Tandy dot-matrix printers lately.tired of
> the racket and can't find ribbons  (They were jamming half the time
> anyways). 
> 
> I do however still have a old HP DeskJet 540 and DeskJet 550c stored up in
> perfect working order.  I held onto these because I knew they would print
> directly from true MS-DOS (something modern printers won't do) and I can
> still get ink for cheap for them.  I think there used to be some sort of
> CoCo serial to parallel convertor that would enable one to print from CoCo
> to a printer such as these, but I can't seem to find one.  Does anyone know
> where I might be able to obtain one?

Another possibility, if you can't procure one of the old convertors, and 
one which I believe one of the guys here actually set up and got working 
(and I think even posted the scripts), is using a *nix box to listen to 
the serial port, and capture the data and pipe it back out to a printer. 
I think he was using a LaserJet (I have a 6MP hanging off my network, 
personally - those things are workhorses).

It might even be possible to do this with a DOS box; if you got an 
embedded form-factor PC, like from these guys:

	http://synertrontech.com/

You could build a fairly small system to do this; in fact, check out 
this board:

	http://synertrontech.com/products/Embedded%20Boards/cv_860a.htm

Model #CV 860A 1R14 would be perfect; you could build a diskless DOS box 
using FreeDOS, or install a console *nix. Boot off a large CF card, or 
DOC. Set it up like a NetBook to minimize writes to the CF/DOC, run out 
of a portion of RAM (put in the maximum memory possible of 512 MB).

If you set it using *nix, then you could have that background process 
running listening to the serial port (which you wire up to the bitbanger 
on a real CoCo, or via the RS-232 Pak, or DriveWire, or Roger's Pak), 
while still being able to kick into the MESS emulator. You could 
transfer files back and forth fairly easily; as well as use the machine 
as a gateway to the net via its ethernet port. The printer could run off 
the parallel port or over the network.

I daresay this is but a few steps away from being the 
mythical/theoretical/much-talked-about "CoCo 4"; not only could it be a 
CoCo thru MESS emulation (maybe even "fork" MESS off into a CoCo-only 
emulator - this would require someone to step forward to handle the fork 
and merging of code changes - if needed - from the MESS project?), it 
would be a peripheral and general purpose interface for a real CoCo...

Maybe Mr. Bjork could give us some further pointers? I wish I had more 
time and less projects...

-- Andrew L. Ayers
    Glendale, Arizona