[Color Computer] Still more CoCo USB Was:[Coco] Re: Coco Digest, Vol 22, ...

[John R. Hogerhuis]

On Sun, 2005-07-31 at 22:33 -0400, RJRTTY at aol.com wrote:

>     A USB floppy ,mouse or even harddrive would work but
> not driving something like a modern inkjet printer.    If I remember
> right somebody years ago back on the old princeton list wrote a driver
> for the coco3 to use such a printer to do high resolution screen
> dumps with a serial to parallel 
> converter..     I know it took an obsurd amount of time tho I
> cant remember exactly how much.     I know a 100Mhz 486
> takes about 10 to 15 seconds to do each pass of the printer
> head so a coco3 would probably be well over an hour per page.

I used a HP PCL printer with my coco for years, but I was doing only
text.

The DeskJets are PCL printers, aren't they? As long as you get the
printer to render the page you could do a whole lot, efficiently, with a
modern inkjet printer.


With a page definition language it's just a matter of having a driver
smart enough not to try to send the data as a bunch of teeny dots. The
sheer amount of data is prohibitive. For a screen dump, maybe you could
download it as the actual size in RAM, and then tell the printer to
scale it up for you.


I know for a fact one could do this with any postscript printer. PCL,
I'm not quite as certain.

-- John.