[Coco] Printing on a Coco with modern printers.

[Al Hartman]

I don't agree that a Coco or a Coco 3 isn't powerful enough to print to 
modern printers. It might assemble a page more slowly than a modern 
computer, and might not be able to rasterize a full page at high resolution 
due to memory constraints, but there's no reason a Coco can't print text or 
graphics at usual CoCo resolutions to a modern printer.

Cocomax, CGDP, ColorMax and other programs printed hi-res (for a Coco) text 
and graphics to a wide range of printers. There's no reason that they could 
not do so today.

All that's needed are drivers.

I'm not saying anyone is going to write them, it would be a huge task. But, 
back in the day I used to use EPStart on my Atari-ST that emulated an Apple 
Imagewriter on an Epson Printer by rasterizing the pages and using the 
printer's hi-res graphics to print. And there were PostScript solutions as 
well.

My ideal solution is to move the client end of DW from the bit-banger port 
to a faster, dedicated port that could be put internal to the Coco, and free 
up the bit-banger for a serial to parallel adapter to print to vintage 
printers.

It would be much easier to mod the one piece of DW client software to 
support a new port, than to rewrite hundreds of apps to print through DW. 
This handles both OS-9/NitrOS9 and RSDOS apps transparently.

Plus, we'd get the benefit of turbo mode operation even on an older Coco 1.

-[ Al ]-