[Coco] Printing on a Coco with modern printers.

[John Donaldson]

I once read an article that stated that the most simple computer can do 
anything a larger faster computer can do as long as the simple computer 
has enough memory and you can wait a long long time for it to crunch the 
numbers.

John Donaldson



On 1/9/2014 6:24 PM, Al Hartman wrote:
> 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 ]-
>
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