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Best Atari printer for my 800


segasaturn

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Update to printing with the Brother HL-L5000D.  I found a nice Centronics adapter Female CN36 to Female DB25, using this adapter you can use stock ICD P:R: and 850 parallel cables, I have also tested it with the U-Print and apeface print adpaters.  I had to make 1 change to epson settings when I stopped using the ICD P:R: connector that was for adding LF.

 

 

  
Edited by venom4728a
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I have a Samsung ML2571n that has a parallel port and USB / network.  Works in printshop with the appropriate connection (have tried the ICD P:R: connection and a Xetec printer interface).

Hoping the Fujinet will make it possible to use network printers for sure!

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7 minutes ago, leech said:

Hoping the Fujinet will make it possible to use network printers for sure!

I’m looking forward to the “print” to PDF feature for sure. The fact that we can’t (yet) do that for garden-variety dot-addressable Epson 9-pin graphics via PC-based SIO emulation software sort of boggles my mind. Back in the 80’s there were dozens of printers that “spoke” Epson; seems like it would be much easier to do it today via software than what those hardware designers had to do to implement it in hardware. 

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59 minutes ago, DrVenkman said:

I’m looking forward to the “print” to PDF feature for sure. The fact that we can’t (yet) do that for garden-variety dot-addressable Epson 9-pin graphics via PC-based SIO emulation software sort of boggles my mind. Back in the 80’s there were dozens of printers that “spoke” Epson; seems like it would be much easier to do it today via software than what those hardware designers had to do to implement it in hardware. 

We just need something like cups embedded in there to be able to do all sorts of awesome things.  But yeah with how popular the Epsons were back then, I am not sure what happened that killed off the printing language.  It was the closest to the standard at one point that we had.

Granted my very first inkjet I bought was an Epson, and that thing was garbage.  If you didn't power it off correctly it would spend 4 hours trying to calibrate and empty the ink cartridges.  Or it would just keep going through some boot loop. 

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3 minutes ago, leech said:

We just need something like cups embedded in there to be able to do all sorts of awesome things.  But yeah with how popular the Epsons were back then, I am not sure what happened that killed off the printing language.  It was the closest to the standard at one point that we had.

Granted my very first inkjet I bought was an Epson, and that thing was garbage.  If you didn't power it off correctly it would spend 4 hours trying to calibrate and empty the ink cartridges.  Or it would just keep going through some boot loop. 

CUPS is pretty huge.  However, lots of modern printers know how to print a PDF directly thanks to AirPrint and IPP, so it may be possible to print straight to a printer after generating the PDF using one of those protocols.

 

And, yes, Epson's printer language was basically like HP PCL in terms of popularity until laser printers started becoming affordable.

 

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12 minutes ago, jamm said:

CUPS is pretty huge.  However, lots of modern printers know how to print a PDF directly thanks to AirPrint and IPP, so it may be possible to print straight to a printer after generating the PDF using one of those protocols.

 

And, yes, Epson's printer language was basically like HP PCL in terms of popularity until laser printers started becoming affordable.

 

Now if only modern printers would handle tractor fed paper!  Then again my laserjet prints so fast.. and tractor fed paper jams so fast...and not in a cool thrash metal sort of way!

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 6/12/2020 at 7:19 PM, venom4728a said:

I found a nice Centronics adapter Female CN36 to Female DB25, using this adapter you can use stock ICD P:R: and 850 parallel cables,

How does that work with the 850/PRC/ICD MIO printer port being DA15, the only printer interface for Atari 8-bits I'm aware of using standard PC DB25 pinout is the reproduction MIO. 

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9 hours ago, BillC said:

How does that work with the 850/PRC/ICD MIO printer port being DA15, the only printer interface for Atari 8-bits I'm aware of using standard PC DB25 pinout is the reproduction MIO. 

The stock cables that were sold for 850 and PRC were DA15 to 36 pin centronics male.  Most of the other brand print adpaters also had a 36 pin centronics male connector as their output. I actually made a cable first for my PRC to the printer.  I wanted the ability to print from my other adapter which prints out Atascii.  

Edited by venom4728a
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On 6/13/2020 at 9:11 AM, DrVenkman said:

I’m looking forward to the “print” to PDF feature for sure. The fact that we can’t (yet) do that for garden-variety dot-addressable Epson 9-pin graphics via PC-based SIO emulation software sort of boggles my mind. Back in the 80’s there were dozens of printers that “spoke” Epson; seems like it would be much easier to do it today via software than what those hardware designers had to do to implement it in hardware. 

The problem is that epson protocol esc/p is practically unsupported. There some code already written to convert esc/p protocol in a big image by interpreting the protocol and drawing dot by dot or sometimes using a predetermined font. For starters, Fujinet code is available, I haven't checked, but I guess is similar to code I've seen in which is a giant switch/case statement and some status variables  in which you have to cover every single option and case of the protocol. 

I start writting my own code, I wanted to add it to respeqt, but I got discoraged after seeing how great programmers here in the group, implemented the same in a limited hardware as esp32. So maybe that code can be used as a starting point to make it happen in respeqt.

Like 2 year ago or so, in a PC I was able to capture the printer information send by Atari thru the SIO to a file. Then I found some DOS and linux tools that interpret the esc/p protocol and transform it to an image or pdf.  Check it out

Better than nothing...

 

atariout2.PDF

Edited by manterola
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20 minutes ago, tschak909 said:

Feel free to take the epson code in #FujiNet and use to graft into RespeQt. That's why it's public. :)

 

-Thom

Question about the print to PDF function.  Will that output to a network share?  I am guessing that is its intention.  I haven't looked into it, but I should see about having a printer share where any pdf file you dump into a watched directory goes to the network printer.  Would be easy to script even, assuming there isn't something already out there.

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4 minutes ago, tschak909 said:

It currently is attached to the web page that gets served by the ESP. Open the fujinet web page (by going to its hostname) and click the printer icon. PDF gets downloaded. It's a well known URL, so it can be scripted. Why make it hard?

 

-Thom

 

Hmm, so a cron and a curl, though that would require the Atari be on.

My current set up at home is that I have both a black and white laserjet and a color one.  Both have network capabilities,  the B/W one supports Epson and IBM, so works great locally printing from the Atari, but I think it would be sweet to be able to dump properly named PDFs from whatever device to a share (whether NFS, FTP, or SMB.) And then have the Linux machine send it off to the actual printer queue. 

This would be nice, as you could create the document, dump it to the share, turn off the Atari and wonder off as the spool is processed.

I see how things are pulled over ftp, can't imagine it being hard to stick the webserver on a remote host either.  Will look into helping with that when I gwt my FujiNets :)

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4 hours ago, mozzwald said:

You could leave the FujiNet microusb plugged in so it remains powered when the atari is off

Curious, does anyone know if you supply power to Lotharek's SIO splitter, how many devices that can power at once?  Though with the way FujiNet is designed, I wonder if it would even work with it.  Then again I think the FujiNet is an 'all in one' device that covers just about everything.

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It depends on how much juice to put into the SIO splitter... I don't think the consumption by the SIO splitter is relatively important. 

I don't see why fujinet wouldn't work with SIO Splitter. The only "issue" I see is that it will keep powered when you power off your computer.

 

 

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