[Coco] new printer sub system for NitrOS-9

[Frank Swygert]

Using DriveWire is really the only practical method of driving a modern 
USB printer. The problem is all the new printers are dumb -- they don't 
generate anything themselves, the driver uses the host computer's 
resources to create the images sent to the printer. That's fine with a 
modern computer that has lots of processing power and memory to work 
with, but the CoCo can't handle that and Nitros9 and another program. I 
suppose you could write a program that would print to one of the 
printers, maybe using HP's language, but it would likely only work with 
a few HP printers, and you wouldn't be able to do anything else while it 
was printgin. I bet it would be extremely slow as well.

The only other alternative is about the same as using DW -- use 
something like the Raspberry Pi or one of the little Android computers 
running a scaled down Linux (something like Puppy Linux) and use it as a 
print server, capturing anything that come in and sending it to a 
printer. You'd have to do about the same work as was done in DW already, 
so you may as well use DW and use the mini computer for file storage 
also. Otherwise you have to write some type of script to capture input 
and send it to the printer and use the Linux printer drivers.

-- 
Frank Swygert
Editor - American Motors Cars Magazine
www.amc-mag.com