[Coco] Printing on a Coco with modern printers.

[Aaron Wolfe]

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.

I think you are missing some of what various people have tried to
explain to you about how modern printers work.

Modern printers have no character generator, fonts, scaling
capability, or *any* logic inside them.  You cannot send text to them.
 You cannot send PCL, PostScript, or anything that the CoCo might have
a chance in heaven of processing in some limited fashion.

There is no option to "print text or graphics at usual CoCo resolutions".

You either print at the single, massively dense resolution the printer
hardware uses, or you do not print. This will be at least 600x600 dots
per inch at 24 or 32 bpp on a $40 printer, much much higher on nicer
ones.

We are talking about literally megabytes of data just to print a
single line of plain text.

>
> 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.
>

They might be able to finish a print job today if you started it last week.

> 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.

DriveWire provides the standard /P device in OS9.  Since it emulates a
printer that software already knows how to print to (epson fx80), this
means all OS9 software works unchanged.  There is no need to rewrite
anything for OS9 software, and it all works right now.

BASIC programs do require a change, but it's fairly simple.

How would your proposed solution avoid needing BASIC programs to also
be changed?

> This handles both OS-9/NitrOS9 and RSDOS apps transparently.
>

Again, how is a new port going to work "transparently" with software
written to use the old port?

> Plus, we'd get the benefit of turbo mode operation even on an older Coco 1.
>
> -[ Al ]-
>
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