[Coco] Printing on a Coco with modern printers.

[Al Hartman]

Let me preface this post with the fact that I have been an authorized 
service technician for HP, Canon, Apple, Lexmark, and other printers both 
Laser, Inkjet, and Dot Matrix since the mid 1980's.

I was co-author of the CoCo Greeting Card Designer which printed to many 
popular printers on the Coco.

-----Original Message----- 
From: Aaron Wolfe

> I think you are missing some of what various people have tried to
> explain to you about how modern printers work.

Nobody tried to explain anything to me. And, I already knew this.

> There is no option to "print text or graphics at usual CoCo resolutions".

Sure there is, if someone would write a driver on the PC end. Many of the 
emulators do this.

> We are talking about literally megabytes of data just to print a
> single line of plain text.

Which was why I said a CoCo didn't have enough RAM to composite a page.


>> Cocomax, CGDP, ColorMax and other programs printed hi-res (for a Coco) 
>> text
>> and graphics to a wide range of printers. There's no reason that they 
>> could
>> not do so today.

> They might be able to finish a print job today if you started it last 
> week.

Didn't take a week to print back then, why would it now?

Same CoCo, same printer.

> How would your proposed solution avoid needing BASIC programs to also
> be changed?

Because they would be printing to a classic printer on the Bit-Banger port 
just like always. DW would change over to a newer port that might even be 
faster.

> Again, how is a new port going to work "transparently" with software
> written to use the old port?

Because DW will use the newer port, and printing will go to the Bit-Banger.

-[ Al ]-