[Coco] [Color Computer] Disto

[gene heskett]

On Thursday, October 27, 2011 01:54:40 PM Michael Nelson did opine:

> Does anyone know how to contact Disto (CRC)Computers?
> Or does anyone own a Disto Disk Controller with the Parallel Printer
> Adapter???

CRC I have not heard from in 15 years, no idea what Tony D. is doing now.
 
I do have this 4n1 version, but its quite less than functional, having died 
for all practical purposes when the FCC passed the home computer radiated 
noise rules about 20 years back up the log.  This made the printer makers 
put some filtering on the parport input jacks of the printers, and that 
slowed the signals enough that the no-handshake port on the disto wasn't 
able to get good data through to the printer.

This is a good port, but because of this we now need a data latch and 
handshaking arrangement inserted in the cabling to latch and hold the data 
after the coco's nominally half microsecond write goes away, one that sets 
the busy flag on a write from the coco, which is then cleared by the 
printers ACK signal indicating the printer actually got that byte.  That is 
all it would take to make it work again with newer printers, and this newer 
category includes the shacks dmp models since the shack put that stuff into 
their printers almost before the FCC started yelping.

Without this data latch and handshaking, you will get a lot of wrong 
characters and missing characters.  Personally, I gave up and switched to a 
printing setup using a serial setup.

That was then, where "then" was about '91 or so.  But eventually I wasn't 
able to get fresh ribbons for my Xerox 1650-ro, (at 40 cps, the fastest 
Daisy Wheel spinner ever made) and had to re-invent this particular wheel 
about 3 years back, which I did by throwing a big buck & change at Brother 
for one of their cheap laser printers, and writing some utils that when 
combined with a long USB cable and hub, sends the output of /p up the USB 
cable via a serial-usb adaptor, where it is captured to a file on this 
linux box, and when the file size was stable for 2 or 3 seconds, hands it 
off to "lp -d BROTHEHL2140 filename" which renders it through the cups 
printing chain and eventually back down that same cable to the laser 
printer, using good fonts at the printers full resolution capability.  
There is a slight, maybe 5 second lag between getting your prompt back from 
"list filename >/p", and the printers warmup, but once started it prints a 
60 page assembly output listing at 21-22 pages a minute.

Whats not to like? :)

FWIW, I am now using the /p from the drivewire client, still done over this 
same USB cabling lashup although the cable itself has been replaced by a 
USB-2.0 cable 33 feet long, and which required a rewrite of cocod to 
cocodw, and it now uses inotifywait to detect the closing of the file on 
this box which then triggers the printing, but is otherwise much the same 
as cocod.  Either one uses coco_print as its output handler, and all 3 can 
be had from my web page under Genes-os9-stf.  Bring your coco printing 
chores into the 21st century, and get output you can be proud to show a 
visitor.  ;-)

Cheers, Gene
-- 
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-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
My web page: <http://coyoteden.dyndns-free.com:85/gene>
If Microsoft built cars, If you were involved in a crash, you would have
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