Date   : Wed, 17 Aug 2005 09:38:06 +0000
From   : Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk@...>
Subject: Re: Modern printers and Beebs

On Wed, 2005-08-17 at 01:19 +0100, Jonathan Graham Harston wrote:
> > Message-ID: <8EDD441C6BF344369701D06FF5B71EDC.MAI@...>
>  
> "Ian Wolstenholme" <BBCMailingList@...> wrote:
> > Does anybody know if modern laser printers can generally be
> > used with Beebs?
>  
> Yes. A printer is a printer is a printer. Send the byte &41 to a
> printer, and it will print "A" somewhere. I've been printing from
> by Beeb with a Kyocera FS-600 for some years now.

Generally true for laser printers - although you might need to send a
certain sequence of charaters to drop the printer into some sort of
'raw' mode I suppose. As you say, there are some exceptions.

I'm not sure if it's possible to get an inkjet any more which doesn't
offload all the processing onto the host machine. Had that problem with
driving an Epson printer from Linux, and naturally Epson are scumbags
and don't make the protocol publicly available :(

I'm not sure how you'd get a more modern system to look like a parallel
printer from the beeb's point of view, but hooking a serial cable
between beeb and modern machine is probably possible and printing from
the beeb as though talking to a serial printer. The modern host just
needs to assemble received characters into a page and then print using a
standard print queue. 

cheers

J.