[Coco] Printing on a Coco with modern printers.

[George Ramsower]

On 1/10/2014 12:02 PM, Frank Swygert wrote:
> Date: Thu, 09 Jan 2014 18:24:07 -0500
> From: Al Hartman<alhartman6 at optonline.net>
>
> I don't agree that a Coco or a Coco 3 isn't powerful enough to print to
> modern printers. It might assemble a page more slowly than a modern
> computer, and might not be able to rasterize a full page at high 
> resolution
> due to memory constraints, but there's no reason a Coco can't print 
> text or
> graphics at usual CoCo resolutions to a modern printer.
>
> 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.
>
> All that's needed are drivers.
>
> ===================================================
  I have to agree to a point on this. I've built files to print that 
were too large for memory. I saved that file info to the hard disk and 
then used that file and routed it to the printer. I would think the same 
thing could be done with one of the modern printers. All that's needed 
is a utility to convert the info to whatever the printer needs and send 
that info to a storage device and then send it to the printer as we have 
time. The conversion would be slow but the actual printing could be as 
fast as the coco can muster up.
  A "driver" would imply something that does this automatically?
  I suppose one of those RS232 serial port DB9 to USB adapters would do 
the trick on that issue. Those things have really got my attention since 
I now have a computer that only uses USB and I really want to connect my 
coco and my X10 timer to it. Both are DB9 type RS232 type of things.
George