[Coco] Coco and Modern Printers

[John Orwen]

-----Original Message----- 
From: Gene Heskett
Sent: Friday, September 14, 2012 2:29 PM
To: coco at maltedmedia.com
Subject: Re: [Coco] Coco and Modern Printers

On Friday 14 September 2012 15:14:32 John Orwen did opine:

> Has anyone ever manufactured or has anyone ever contemplated making and
> selling a multipak cartride with an internal rom and an external usb
> port on it to interface to modern printers.  One that would contain the
> generic driver code to connect to any usb printer. That would convert
> the commands Print#-2 and LLIST for correct generic usb font and line
> only graphics from any coco and to any usb printer.  I would think that
> everyone with a modern computer connected to a usb printer would want
> something like this for their still active coco.  Maybe I am the only
> one in the Universe.  Any comments would be accepted.
> John

John, its an inviting idea, but not practical unless a whole separate
modern cpu and a gig or so of memory were involved in the cartridge.

That is why, now that I have drivewire running, have drivewire save the raw
file sent to the drivewire version of /p, and then send that file back thru
the cups (common unix printing system) version of lp, thence to a $110
brother B&W laser printer, where 3 seconds after I get the prompt back on
the coco from 'list'ing the file to > /p, that brother fires up, warms the
drum for 3 or 4 seconds, then spits it out at 600 dpi and  22 pages a
minute.

That 2k a page text file is rasterized in order for modern printers to
understand it, and may amount to 50-500 megs of data generated for each
page printed depending on the text to graphics ratio.  Modern machines can
shovel that amount of data around effortlessly at 500x the speed the coco
can move it.

I am not saying that the job cannot be done on the coco, but it will be a
highly fragmented, always swapping big hunks of code that to match the
visual quality, would likely take more than an hour a page.  Lots more.

There is no reason a similar script cannot be written for a windows box.
But I know just enough about windows to format the drive & install linux.

Cheers, Gene

Gene, Thank you for the reply.  In your explanation, I wasn't aware that 
would be the way it would have to done.  My thought was that an
8k Rom would be able to handle a serial stream input of character code 
followed be character code of up to 255 characters including text lines 
including caps and lowercase and punctuation as an input, modify the code 
received and output it to the usb port as generic fixed font code for any 
modern printer and not try to emulate the driver codes for a hundred 
different printers connected to a pc.  A direct connection from the coco has 
been done on floppy drive controllers to convert from a serial into a lpr 
out.  Its been a long time since I have worked extensively with a coco. 
Maybe I am totally off base.
John