[Coco] Printing on a Coco with modern printers.

[Louis Ciotti]

I have wondered if maybe bluetooth bpp would be an alternative for vintage
machines.  I do not know enough about it to even fathom how to get it to
work, but it seems like it was meant to be a simple text only output.


On Thu, Jan 9, 2014 at 6:24 PM, Al Hartman <alhartman6 at optonline.net> wrote:

> I don't agree that a Coco or a Coco 3 isn't powerful enough to print to
> modern printers. It might assemble a page more slowly than a modern
> computer, and might not be able to rasterize a full page at high resolution
> due to memory constraints, but there's no reason a Coco can't print text or
> graphics at usual CoCo resolutions to a modern printer.
>
> Cocomax, CGDP, ColorMax and other programs printed hi-res (for a Coco)
> text and graphics to a wide range of printers. There's no reason that they
> could not do so today.
>
> All that's needed are drivers.
>
> I'm not saying anyone is going to write them, it would be a huge task.
> But, back in the day I used to use EPStart on my Atari-ST that emulated an
> Apple Imagewriter on an Epson Printer by rasterizing the pages and using
> the printer's hi-res graphics to print. And there were PostScript solutions
> as well.
>
> My ideal solution is to move the client end of DW from the bit-banger port
> to a faster, dedicated port that could be put internal to the Coco, and
> free up the bit-banger for a serial to parallel adapter to print to vintage
> printers.
>
> It would be much easier to mod the one piece of DW client software to
> support a new port, than to rewrite hundreds of apps to print through DW.
> This handles both OS-9/NitrOS9 and RSDOS apps transparently.
>
> Plus, we'd get the benefit of turbo mode operation even on an older Coco 1.
>
> -[ Al ]-
>
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