Hooking an ST up to a laser printer

[jblenkle]

Tonight I was experimenting around and tried hooking up my 1040ST to my HP laser printer. When I tried printing something, it would not even recognize that it was there. I figured I'd get something even if I didn't have a correct printer driver installed.

 

I know back in the 80s I would take my ST to work after hours and was able to use some programs to print with it there on HP laser jets.

 

Just to be sure, I plugged the ST into my old Epson RX/FT dot matrix and it printed just fine.

 

Anyone got any tips for getting it to work on the HP with programs like ST Writer and 1st Word? I don't really care if I get full featured printing with bold, etc. Just so it prints.

 

 

[atarian1]

Gosh. It's been a while, but I think you need some type of Epson emulation driver because the built-in printer driver in GEM is made for Atari SMM804 and Epson printers. I don't recall one for ST Writer or 1st Word.

 

When the ST was my main computer, I already moved on to GDOS based word/document processors which had HP LaserJet drivers already supported.

[Zogging Hell]

I used an Epson EPL5700 laser, which was HP compatible for a long while (it amazingly is still on the first toner cartridge, despite years of fairly heavy use), but I used speedo gdos or NVDI to print. IIRC correctly there was a review of some program in Atari ST Review that could make 1st Word work natively with HP deskjets or lasers but ideally 1st word likes Epson compatible stuff. If you want to print off that HP you are better off looking at something like Papyrus, or other GDOS programs (Calligrapher, Tempus Word, MS Write, That's Write etc spring to mind). If it is just text then Everest is a GDOS compatible text editor, just be prepared to loose some of the formatting. NVDI is a fairly large overhead though, and most of those WPs I mentioned are pretty heavy weight as well, which might make space tight on a plain 1040. Marcel might work with Laserjet though, and if there is an option to print to a HP deskjet I would try that, even though it is for inkjets.

Edited August 6, 2017 by Zogging Hell

[simonsunnyboy]

My Falcon prints well with NVDI 4 to a HP LaserJet 1200 connected through the parallel port.

I never tried without NVDI though. So any laser printer with PCL should work through NVDI.

[pixelmischief]

SpeedoGDOS also has drivers for the HP LaserJet III, which works on a variety of HP LaserJets at and after that period.

[Atarialex]

Marcel Word processor has HP laserjet drivers and prints to my hp laserjet 5

[Bee]

I know Word Perfect had printer driver disks.  A quick search shows Calumus had the ability to print to HP laser too.

Edited January 19, 2022 by Bee