[Coco] Single board Pentium computer... "CoCo4" or

[Gene Heskett]

On Friday 18 December 2009, Frank Swygert wrote:
>I disagree that the expansion slot is a necessity. Almost all cartridge
> games are available now as disk images and are easy to get.
>
>I do think that some kind of easy hardware interface is needed, that's why
> I've brought up the parallel port in the past. It could be easily
> programmed to act like a PIA, which most CoCo programmers can interface
> with easy enough. It could be programmed to act like MOST of the cartridge
> port, but not quite. Running the legacy hardware just isn't necessary when
> it is all emulated in software faster and more reliably now. A USB adapter
> card with a cartridge port on it has merit though. Steve was thinking a
> PCI card with a cartridge port on it. I just don't think there's a big
> enough market for a PCI card, but a USB adapter...
>
>I like your idea about a USB port on a card! The problem is deciding what
> it can do. You'd need firmware on the card to drive a printer or storage
> device. A single card with two ports, one emulating a hard or floppy drive
> and one a printer port would be really nice, even if the printer could
> only produce text.
>
Gah, top posting.  Boo hiss...

Bear in mind that any printer new enough to have a usb port is also a dumb 
(probably a 'gdi') printer, needing what it prints converted into a raster 
image before it ever sees the usb port.

I use a Brother HL-2140 for my coco printing needs, but with a pair of bash 
scripts running on this machine that captures the text output of the rear 
panel serial port, through an FDTI serial to usb cable plugged into a 4 port 
hub near the coco3, and sends that text back to the HL-2140 with an lpd 
command, which runs the text through the enscript, thence to ghostscript, and 
back to the HLK-2140 as image data.  There is a bit of a delay because my 
script waits till the port goes silent for 3 reads in a row before sending 
the capture on, and of course a warmup delay in the Brother, but once that's 
done, my assembly listings spit out at 20+ pages a minute.  Sure beats the 
older Xerox 1650-ro I did use for years, but cannot get ribbons for anymore.

[...]

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
The NRA is offering FREE Associate memberships to anyone who wants them.
<https://www.nrahq.org/nrabonus/accept-membership.asp>

Worrying is like rocking in a rocking chair -- It gives you something to do,
but it doesn't get you anywhere.