[Coco] Printing from the Color Computer

[John W. Linville]

Not really, although that probably is a good indicator.  But in the
long run getting a physical connection to the printer is a Simple
Matter Of Hacking... :-)

I think the issue that Brian was worried about was whether or not the
printer could be driven by data that the CoCo can reasonably generate.
Modern day "consumer-grade" printers are fairly stupid on the inside,
requiring some amount of processing on the host to do rasterization
of whatever needs to be printed.  That isn't impossible for the
CoCo, but it would require a lot more processing and data transfer
than what we used to send to our DMP-100 "back in the day".  Also,
in many cases the details of what to send are poorly documented
or not documented at all outside the device manufacturer's walls.
This is also the reason that printing for Linux (and to some extent
Mac) remains more hit-and-miss than most other modern hardware support.

With that said, you probably need a more expensive-ish printer that
understands PCL, or maybe Postscript if you can find a CoCo app
that can generate that.  The physical interface is probably still
an issue, but that is not insurmountable.  OTOH, using DriveWire to
drive a Linux-compatible printer through a Raspberry Pi is probably
a reasonable-enough option to satisfy most needs?  YMMV, of course...

John

On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 09:03:20PM +0000, lciotti1 at gmail.com wrote:
> As in a printer with a serial port would probably be the easiest... Correct?
> 
> 
> Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: "John W. Linville" <linville at tuxdriver.com>
> Sender: coco-bounces at maltedmedia.com
> Date: Mon, 18 Feb 2013 15:51:41 
> To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts<coco at maltedmedia.com>
> Reply-To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts <coco at maltedmedia.com>
> Subject: Re: [Coco] Printing from the Color Computer
> 
> On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 02:45:25PM -0600, Brian G wrote:
> > Is it possible to print from any of the Color Computers but
> > specifically the 3?
> > Is it possible to connect through Drivewire and a micro controller to print.
> > Will it be plain text (ASCII) or can output from Simply Better, the
> > Owl Ware Window Writer or any of the word processing/ formatting
> > programs work?
> > 
> > Can we do printing without the large CPU, large memory, big power
> > supply computers?
> 
> I think that mostly depends on the printer...
> 
> -- 
> John W. Linville		Someday the world will need a hero, and you
> linville at tuxdriver.com			might be all we have.  Be ready.
> 
> --
> Coco mailing list
> Coco at maltedmedia.com
> http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/coco
> 
> --
> Coco mailing list
> Coco at maltedmedia.com
> http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/coco
> 

-- 
John W. Linville		Someday the world will need a hero, and you
linville at tuxdriver.com			might be all we have.  Be ready.