[Coco] CoCoNet

[John Eric]

Which is exactly why I realized I wouldn't be able to do it myself, but it sure would be neat. The dmp-105 is supported by almost all CoCo programs, so I thought it would be a good one to emulate. It's sad that windows made printers ''dumb'' - the first inkjets that my uncle got back in the 90's would work with the coco, but later on, they starting depending upon windows and the pc's cpu to handle the nitty gritty and so could no longer be attached to the good old coco...




________________________________
From: Roger Taylor <operator at coco3.com>
To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Saturday, December 27, 2008 8:13:11 PM
Subject: Re: [Coco] CoCoNet

At 07:22 PM 12/27/2008, you wrote:
> Roger, regarding the following: I had been considering creating a PC program that monitored the com1 or com2 port and acted like a DMP-105. My intention was to have the pc interpret the dmp-105 codes sent from the CoCo and create a BMP or PDF of the page exactly as it would have been printed on the real DMP-105. It could then be printed from the PC to a inkjet or laser printer. Of course, I soon realized that I do not posses the technical know-how to perform such a feat, so maybe some others out there perhaps can do such a thing - maybe even you :) JE

I plan to add the PRINT #-2 support so the PC side could do something with that data, but I haven't looked into how I'd handle it completely.  The PC wouldn't know when the CoCo is through printing, so a file of the print data would probably have to written in chunks by opening, writing, closing, so that another app could access the file and do whatever with it.

I do know how to create BMP images of printer text which are dumped to the PC printer.  This is how Rainbow IDE prints out files.  Some kind of CoCo printer emulator would have to be integrated into such a program which would draw to the bitmap image for each printable page.  A series of BMP images would represent the printer pages.  It sounds like a very complex project considering how printer margins and page lengths and sizes are dealt with on each side.

-- Roger Taylor

http://www.wordofthedayonline.com


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