[Coco] Printing on a Coco with modern printers.

[Bill Pierce]

Usually, other than plain text, the only other printing was graphics dumps. Most programs I've seen under OS9 L2 that allow printing graphics offer choices for several printers usually including the Epsons.
If the Epson wasn't offered, there was usually a setting either in a config file or menu function to set your printer differently. Some programs even had "printer profiles" that could be setup for your printer model.
There were of course programs that printed "formatted" text and even those usually offered printer configurations. Only some of the earliest OS9 L2 releases had no configuration for the printers. Most program authors who used printing in their programs understood that there were a variety of printers out there and at least tried to cover the most popular printers.

All-in-all, there were only a handful of programs in OS9 L2 that even delt with hi-res graphics much less printing them.
Some that come to mind are MV Canvas, Ultimuse3, Home Publisher, DeskMate3, CCArtist, Micro Illustrator, News Paper Plus, PhantomGraph, Coco Calligrapher and a few others

I don't think it would be too much trouble under L2 to convert/adjust most printer routines for Epson compatabilty. Now OS9 L1 would be a different story. A lot of programs were hard coded for the DMP printers. Still, not many programs printed graphics (under OS9).

The real problem children are in RSDOS and since DW4 doesn't allow printing through RSDOS (yet), then I would say RSDOS printing is N/A and out of the discussion (for now).

Bill Pierce
My Music from the Tandy/Radio Shack Color Computer 2 & 3
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-----Original Message-----
From: Aaron Wolfe <aawolfe at gmail.com>
To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Tue, Jan 14, 2014 1:50 pm
Subject: Re: [Coco] Printing on a Coco with modern printers.


On Jan 14, 2014 1:37 PM, "James Jones" <jejones3141 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 3:03 AM, Aaron Wolfe <aawolfe at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > 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.
> >
> >
> I'm somewhat surprised by this. The Epson MX-80 and its descendants were
> certainly popular then, but to the best of my knowledge, printing anything
> other than plain old text was left to individual programs under OS-9, and
> if everybody agreed to use Epson escape codes I'm not aware of it.
>

I was under the impression that most programs understand the Epson codes,
but I really don't know details.  I always planned on adding other printer
emulations like the DMP series from RS but never found documentation on
them (or had the time).

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