[Coco] Printing on a Coco with modern printers.

[Al Hartman]

No, that's not what I was thinking of.

I was thinking to free up the Bit-Banger port for printing (or even telecom) 
by moving DW to a dedicated serial or even parallel port.

Then, a CoCo could print to vintage printers, which can still be found on 
eBay and at swap meets.

Under OS-9/NitrOS9 and DW, one surely could redirect printing through a host 
system to a modern printer having the host composite and print the page 
similar to how PostScript Engines used to do it.

But, I would think that most people today don't use their CoCo as their main 
system. They use it to run vintage software like games, or other things. A 
PC or Mac is much more suitable to desktop publishing, word processing, and 
large spreadsheets.

Back in the day, I kept my Checkbook in Elite*Calc, but today I use 
LibreOffice.

I was just thinking that designing a dedicated port for DW might open up new 
possibilities, for added DW capabilities and more speed.

And... Since I run my CoCo mostly in RS-DOS mode, I'd be able to use my own 
application to print things. It doesn't help me to load CGDP or the Car Sign 
Designer from a DW drive, and then be unable to print.

-[ Al ]-

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

Ok.. I think I am understanding your proposal.. stop me if I get it wrong :)

You're saying that the CoCo probably could drive a modern printer in a
limited fashion, given enough ram etc.  *but* your idea was not that
we actually try to do that.  Your idea was that we could take the
output that CoCo programs already produce and connect the bitbanger
they already use to a PC takes this "legacy" output and drives a
modern printer.  Is that accurate?  I hope I'm getting it, because we
could easily do this with just a couple changes to DriveWire.

DW already knows how to render one type of output (fx80), and the
framework supports adding more printer emulations if they were
written.
It also already connects to the bitbanger.  So the only remaining
issue is that DW ties up the bitbanger for itself (this is actually
the reason I ever began work on DW4, although it was because I wanted
to use the bitbanger for telecom stuff, not printing).

We can easily add a function in DriveWire that allows the CoCo or the
user to say "hey Drivewire, I want to use the bitbanger to print
something".  DW can then kick the serial poty down to the proper bps
speed and feed bytes to the emulated printer it already has.  When the
print job is done, the user or coco would need to tell DW to become
"normal" again.

There is a conflict if the program needs to read from the disk before
it's done sending the print job.  We could detect this situation
easily enough in the disk io routines, but I'm not sure if there is
any simple way to make things work properly.  I will think about that.

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