[Coco] printing to epson from OS-9

[Gene Heskett]

On Sunday 26 August 2012 16:23:49 Willard Goosey did opine:

> On Sun, Aug 26, 2012 at 07:35:05AM +0000, Aaron Wolfe wrote:
> > You know, I always intended to emulate the DMPs as well as the Epson,
> > I just never found the right documentation and a round tuit.
> 
> OK, you've been hanging out with Gene *way* too much. ;-)
> 
I resemble that remark! :)

Long before I ever heard of drivewire, I was sending my assembly listings 
out over /p at 9600 baud, which fed a serial to usb convertor which in turn 
I was listening to /dev/ttyUSB1 (the usp is ttyUSB0 here) with a bash 
script that wrote it off to a file.  When no data had arrived for about 2 
seconds, my script figured the listing was done, and handed the file off to 
/dev/lp with the options to send it to a $110 Brother laser printer via the 
cups based rasterizer.  About 5 seconds for the printer to preheat the 
drum, and my listing spit itself out in beautiful truetype fonts at about 
22 pages a minute, 20x faster than any other printer I had ever had tied to 
the coco.  When I tried drivewire, the first question I asked Aaron was how 
to get a raw file out of it, which I then modified my script to handle.  
And its faster even than before, only the drum heat time lag still remains.
  
> > Everything I used to make the Epson emulator is in this document,
> > which includes all the control codes:
> > 
> > http://cococoding.com/xfer/fx80__uv.pdf
> 
> Ah-ha!  Excellent!  Documentation!  Somewhat chatty docs... But so be
> it!


Epson  _used_ to be great at that, then the Oki lawyers saw another cash 
cow, and started charging $85 a copy for the users manual that had all that 
in it, along about the Oki-324 period.  Epson of course followed suit.  The 
last epson printer that I had a manual for was the original Epson Sylus 
Color, which had the same resoluition as a cgp-220, 640 dots per line.  
Fuggly, but it was color!  A lot of printers have hit the dumpster at the 
coyote's.den since, but there is still an Epson NX-515 AIO sitting here, 
primarily because the linux gutenprint drivers blow the factory drivers 
clear out of the drainage for top quality.
 
> Thanks for the excellent work on Drivewire!
> 
> Willard

I've said words to that effect myself, thank you Aaron, drivewire is an 
amazing package.

Cheers, Gene
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