[Coco] [Color Computer] Coco serial cable

[Christian Lesage]

wdg3rd at comcast.net wrote:
> The DMP-105 was the successor to the LP-VII with a white case instead of Mercedes silver.  To the best of my knowledge, that was the only change.  Just as slow and noisy and just as crappy print.  (A dot-matrix impact printer with only one pin is sort of limited from the start).
>   

Allow me to have my say in this incredibly popular thread!

The DMP printer that was the same as the Line Printer VII was the 
DMP-100, not the 105. I know, 'cause I bought a second-hand one in 1986 
or so, and it was crappy as hell. I remember writing at least three 
BASIC programs to get the most out of it. One of them was a graphics 
screen dumper. The second one would allow me to print the accented 
characters we use in French, because this dinosaur only supported the 
plain ASCII character set. IIRC, I would print a line of text without 
the accents, send a carriage return without a line feed, switch to 
graphics mode, and then add the accents over the letters that needed 
them in a second pass. Then I would revert to text mode, send a line 
feed, and repeat the process for the next line. Yes, printing time was 
doubled, so if you, English-speaking folks, think it was slow, just 
imagine how sluggish it was for me! The third program I wrote for this 
clunker would use the graphics mode for all text printing. I wrote it 
after I discovered (by myself) the HPRINT bitmap font in the CoCo 3 ROM, 
which had descenders and (almost all) accented characters. I was so 
excited when I discovered that font... and I immediately saw the 
opportunity to use it with the printer.

I was 15, and had plenty of time, but no money. Those were the times...

Christian