[Coco] CoCo Serial to Parallel

[Gene Heskett]

On Wednesday 28 October 2009, Andrew wrote:
>> Message: 1
>> Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:22:15 -0500
>> From: "Chad H" <chadbh74 at hotmail.com>
>> Subject: [Coco] CoCo Serial to Parallel
>> To: <coco at maltedmedia.com>
>> Message-ID: <COL103-DS200C7AE34109625396E5F4C8B90 at phx.gbl>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>>
>> Have been getting rid of some old Tandy dot-matrix printers lately.tired
>> of the racket and can't find ribbons  (They were jamming half the time
>> anyways).
>>
>> I do however still have a old HP DeskJet 540 and DeskJet 550c stored up
>> in perfect working order.  I held onto these because I knew they would
>> print directly from true MS-DOS (something modern printers won't do) and
>> I can still get ink for cheap for them.  I think there used to be some
>> sort of CoCo serial to parallel convertor that would enable one to print
>> from CoCo to a printer such as these, but I can't seem to find one.  Does
>> anyone know where I might be able to obtain one?
>
>Another possibility, if you can't procure one of the old convertors, and
>one which I believe one of the guys here actually set up and got working
>(and I think even posted the scripts), is using a *nix box to listen to
>the serial port, and capture the data and pipe it back out to a printer.
>I think he was using a LaserJet (I have a 6MP hanging off my network,
>personally - those things are workhorses).

That would be me.  Using a Brother HL-2170.  Quickest printer in the house by 
a very wide margin.

>It might even be possible to do this with a DOS box; if you got an
>embedded form-factor PC, like from these guys:

That dos box would likely need 50x the memory, ghostscript is hungry.

>	http://synertrontech.com/
>
>You could build a fairly small system to do this; in fact, check out
>this board:
>
>	http://synertrontech.com/products/Embedded%20Boards/cv_860a.htm
>
>Model #CV 860A 1R14 would be perfect; you could build a diskless DOS box
>using FreeDOS, or install a console *nix. Boot off a large CF card, or
>DOC. Set it up like a NetBook to minimize writes to the CF/DOC, run out
>of a portion of RAM (put in the maximum memory possible of 512 MB).
>
>If you set it using *nix, then you could have that background process
>running listening to the serial port (which you wire up to the bitbanger
>on a real CoCo, or via the RS-232 Pak, or DriveWire, or Roger's Pak),
>while still being able to kick into the MESS emulator. You could
>transfer files back and forth fairly easily; as well as use the machine
>as a gateway to the net via its ethernet port. The printer could run off
>the parallel port or over the network.

Or over a USB extension cable both ways, I have a 4 port hub on the coco-3's 
desk, with a FDTI rs-232 to USB from the bit banger to the hub, and the 
printer also plugged into the hub.  Traffic isn't a problem because my script 
waits till the coco quits sending data before it sends it off to the Brother 
with an lpr command.

>I daresay this is but a few steps away from being the
>mythical/theoretical/much-talked-about "CoCo 4"; not only could it be a
>CoCo thru MESS emulation (maybe even "fork" MESS off into a CoCo-only
>emulator - this would require someone to step forward to handle the fork
>and merging of code changes - if needed - from the MESS project?), it
>would be a peripheral and general purpose interface for a real CoCo...
>
>Maybe Mr. Bjork could give us some further pointers? I wish I had more
>time and less projects...
>
>-- Andrew L. Ayers
>    Glendale, Arizona
>
>--
>Coco mailing list
>Coco at maltedmedia.com
>http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/coco
>


-- 
Cheers, Gene
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