[Coco] What do people want?

[David Ladd]

On Fri, Dec 12, 2014 at 8:37 AM, Allen Huffman <alsplace at pobox.com> wrote:
>> On Dec 12, 2014, at 7:13 AM, Francis Swygert <farna at att.net> wrote:
>><cut>
> How does one print from a CoCo these days? I still have my DMP-13X printer, but I doubt the ribbons are any good after 20 years, and I haven't seen fanfold printer paper in ages. I didn't expect I would ever be able to use it again?

There are some places that sell refurbished ribbons online.  Possibly
see if you could get the raw ribbon and refurbish your own?

>
> ...which could mean a CoCo SERIAL to USB HOST adapter might be useful, where the adapter does all the translation to output modern USB printer codes. Hmmm, interesting idea. I have all the parts for this, and may take a look at adding it to my joystick interface.

Well for those people using DW you can print through OS-9.  Problem is
Aaron had asked, on the site for DriveWire, for help to create/write a
full emulation for a printer(s) to stick into the DW server.
So what I am guessing this routine would need to capture all of the
print information.  Build a version of it in memory as it would show
up on the real printer being emulated.  Then would need to send that
in-memory image to the printer services on the host(PC OS) for
printing.

Not sure how easy that would be, but I guess could get a ROM dump from
a most supported printer(s) and use those as a basis to create the
emulation module(s)?