[Coco] DriveWire printing options

[Bob Devries]

Aaron, you said:

> If you want to send me a captured file I can see what can be done.

Sadly, I only have this laptop in my possession at the moment. I'm waiting 
for my lovely wife to come here to Australia from the Philippines, before I 
remove all my goods and chattels from storage.

You did remember that MIDI output from Ultimuse runs at the usual MIDI baud 
rate of ~31kb?

Regards, Bob Devries
Goulburn, NSW, Australia
--
Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's 
native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer.

Edsger W.Dijkstra, 18 June 1975

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Aaron Wolfe" <aawolfe at gmail.com>
To: "CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts" <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Monday, December 28, 2009 9:01 AM
Subject: Re: [Coco] DriveWire printing options


On Sun, Dec 27, 2009 at 4:23 PM, Bob Devries <devries.bob at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Aaron.
>
> If I'm understanding you correctly, then the initial output from drivewire
> will be a RAW dump of the data from the port (whether bitbanger or (if
> supported) parallel port).
>
> Then any tool can be used (if necessary) to convert the RAW to either a
> picture file or a text file, or for that matter a MIDI file if the output 
> is
> from Ultimuse.
>

That is correct

> Do you envisage support for Ultimuse, which also uses the bitbanger port,
> albeit at a different bit rate?
>

It should be possible to capture this to a file, although I think midi
is sometimes bi directional (not too familiar with this).  if it is
just a dump of midi values, then I think the capture could be used
with a midi player, maybe need some massaging of the data.
If you want to send me a captured file I can see what can be done.

> Regards, Bob Devries
> Goulburn, NSW, Australia
>
> --
> Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's
> native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer.
>
> Edsger W.Dijkstra, 18 June 1975
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Aaron Wolfe" <aawolfe at gmail.com>
> To: "CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts" <coco at maltedmedia.com>
> Sent: Sunday, December 27, 2009 8:44 PM
> Subject: Re: [Coco] DriveWire printing options
>
>
>> The tool I'm creating will take bytes captured from the bitbanger (or
>> anything else that can generate the bytes usually sent to a printer)
>> and output an image: png, gif, jpg, tiff etc. Probably PNG, it seems
>> to make the nicest output so far.
>>
>> You can easily put these images into a PDF or any other format if
>> you'd like, but that won't be part of the tool. Plenty of ways to do
>> that kind of thing already. If you want to work with the text, well
>> you probably wouldn't want to use this tool at all since the text will
>> already be in the file you would feed to this tool. Maybe we can make
>> a simple filter to strip out any printer control codes, but it would
>> be simpler to configure your application not to put them in there in
>> the first place, if possible.
>>
>> I've attached a sample of the output from the tool I'm creating. Its
>> still pretty limited but can do several dot pitches and "NLQ" mode.
>> Finishing up text/font controls won't take long, and graphics are
>> pretty simple too. Probably have something that pretty much works by
>> the end of tomorrow.
>>
>> If you're nostalgic for dot matrix printouts, enjoy the sample :)
>> There is an awful lot of tweaking you can do on the output when it's
>> not real ink. Dot size and shape, darkness, etc are easy to play
>> with. I've got it looking pretty authentic (i think, it's been a
>> while since I looked at a 9 pin dot matrix printout) but for some uses
>> it might be nice to tweak it to look better/more readable, in fact
>> getting output better than such a printer could actually create is
>> certainly possible.
>>
>> -Aaron
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Dec 26, 2009 at 6:44 PM, Frank Swygert <farna at att.net> wrote:
>>>
>>> I suggest PDF file output for portability, and that will handle graphics
>>> as
>>> well as text. If someone needs an editable text file all they have to do
>>> is
>>> open the file in a PDF reader and copy the text then paste into any
>>> editor
>>> they'd like as a text file.
>>>
>>> What you really need to do is look at the possible scenarios and decide
>>> which is easiest to incorporate. If someone intends to use this for
>>> something other than programming they will want graphics output too, so 
>>> a
>>> plain text print wouldn't work for them. Because PC printers are stupid
>>> and
>>> need the CPU to do most of the work, you may be limited to something 
>>> like
>>> text output. That is better than nothing!
>>> --
>>> Frank Swygert
>>> Publisher, "American Motors Cars" Magazine (AMC)
>>> For all AMC enthusiasts
>>> http://farna.home.att.net/AMC.html
>>> (free download available!)
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Coco mailing list
>>> Coco at maltedmedia.com
>>> http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/coco
>>>
>>
>
>
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