[Coco] Printing to a REAL printer

[Gene Heskett]

On Sunday 23 March 2014 08:54:50 Bill did opine:

> Is there ANY way to print to a REAL Coco-compatible printer while using
> DriveWire?
> 
> I have a multipack and an RS-232 Pak and a cable (25pin to 4pin DIN)
> that can be re-wired.
> 
> What wires would go where?
> 
> Thanks

Do you have a printer you can drive with a serial db25 db25 cable from that 
rs232 pack?

Most of those will either have shot pins in the printhead, or might even be 
daisy wheels.  Any ribbon you can find for a daisy wheel will probably be a 
one time film ribbon, and so old now the film will shatter on the 1st 
hammer strike.

If you really want the look of the 7x9 character set from a pin pounder, 
drivewire can make an image that looks quite like an old FX80 printers 
output when printed on any modern printer.  But you will be using a modern 
printer, the same one you are using on your (spit) windows box now.  And 
its still 5 to 20x faster. 5x if an ink squirter, up to 20x if your duty 
printer is a laser.

But the character ambiguities that leaves is a PIMA.  For starters, you 
can't tell a one from a lowercase ell.  So I wrote some scripts that watch 
where drivewire puts the text files it gets from the drivewire version of 
the /p driver, senses when the file has been closed by drivewire, then 
checks for any housekeeping needed, rename/moves it to a temp spool 
directory and feeds it to cups, which renders it into the image that a 
Brother HL2140 needs, and sends that image to the Brother, which is sitting 
on the top shelf of a computer desk the coco3 is on.  All over USB2.0 
cabling.

So I can "list filename >/p", 5-15 seconds later the Brother warms up (its 
a cheap B&W laser) and spits it out at about 20 pages a minute in 600 dpi 
rendered text.  Fastest, easiest to read paper I've ever gotten from an 
assembly listing on the coco.  Redirecting an assembly listing straight to 
the printer will wait until the assembly is done of course but it works 
just as well.

Those scripts, 2 of them, can be downloaded from my web page.  I also have 
a wrapper that starts drivewire AND the background script so its all 
automatic.  Grab and hack away to make them work for you, or if comfy 
writing bash scripts that will function as background daemons, looping 
forever when they are wakened up.  Does the job, relaunches the watcher 
utility, and sleeps till the watcher returns with the filename to print.

Those old pin pounders were so 30 years ago.  Its very hard to make one 
work, and keep it working.  This uses modern, very pretty print printers 
that will put marks on 2500 sheets on decent paper for one $70 toner 
cartridge, whereas the ink squirters have all degenerated into needing at 
least 6 tanks of each color at $100 a kit to print half a 500 sheet ream.  
When I realized I was using $600 worth of inks to do a ream of paper a year 
was when I dropped that card for a color laser, also from Brother and it 
too Just works(TM).  I've had it about 18 months now, have run 4 or 5 reams 
of paper through it and replaced the starter black toner once.  When I want 
to do color photo's, HP makes some 32 lb glossy on both sides paper they 
sell in half ream packages and with a wee bit of tweaking in cups, the 
photo reproduction is pretty darned exact.

Whats not to like?

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Cheers, Gene
-- 
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