Is it possible to connect an Atari printer to a PC?

[nsummy]

I found one thread about something similar:  https://atariage.com/forums/topic/271537-can-any-atari-emulator-talk-to-real-sio-devices/  But while googling this the one theme always remained:  people wanting to connect disk drives to their computer or connecting the actual atari to the PC.  It seems like I could use the Atarsio kernal with an SIO-USB device but just wanted to get any thoughts before buying one.  I bought an XDM121 printer from Goodwill last week with no way to use it :)  Of course the alternative would be purchasing an 8-bit atari on ebay to use it with...

[TGB1718]

Maybe SIO2PC or 1050toPC with purpose written driver for a printer

Edited February 4, 2020 by TGB1718
Add diagrams

[nsummy]

Thanks for the response.  Let me clarify a little bit too.  I don't mean printing directly from Windows.  I mean using an emulator, more than likely this:  http://www.xl-project.com/about.html   AtariWriter Plus comes with the driver so I was hoping to run that through the emulator, connected to the printer.  Thanks!

[TGB1718]

Sorry, never used that emulator, so can't comment if what you want to do is possible, I use Altirra for emulation,

I'm not sure thats possible with it either, maybe someone else will know if you can connect "real" Atari hardware

via an interface to Altirra

[Rybags]

I think it was XFormer that had the ability to interface to a real Atari drive.  Though I suspect it used a custom interface via the PC printer/parallel port.

 

In theory any SIO device should be connectable to the PC with the right host-end driver.  But in many cases you'd question why.

Atari printers are pretty much obsolete, there's likely plenty of working dot matrixes around that will interface more easily.

[TGB1718]

I did the reverse of this, I have no Atari Pinter, but I do have an SIO to Centronics parallel interface, what I did was

to make an interface socket to an Arduino Uno, wrote some code to manage the interface and printed from

my 130XE to my PC, the text being printed in the Arduino output screen, easy to copy/paste into a text

document and print on my "modern" printer

[nsummy]

3 hours ago, Rybags said:

I think it was XFormer that had the ability to interface to a real Atari drive.  Though I suspect it used a custom interface via the PC printer/parallel port.

 

In theory any SIO device should be connectable to the PC with the right host-end driver.  But in many cases you'd question why.

Atari printers are pretty much obsolete, there's likely plenty of working dot matrixes around that will interface more easily.

Yes I did read about Xformer, seems like they have native support for any controller or disk drive.  It would have to be an SIO to USB dongle.  I might just email them and see what they think.  As to the why, well thats always a good question lol.  This model is a daisy wheel printer so it sounds a lot cooler than a dot matrix.  I also got it for 60 bucks including shipping.  I was hoping to set it up to a SBC and have it print out the news and weather every morning.  In other words, I'm not actually wanting to hook this up to my pc to use as a normal printer

[bfollowell]

1 hour ago, nsummy said:

Yes I did read about Xformer, seems like they have native support for any controller or disk drive.  It would have to be an SIO to USB dongle.  I might just email them and see what they think.  As to the why, well thats always a good question lol.  This model is a daisy wheel printer so it sounds a lot cooler than a dot matrix.  I also got it for 60 bucks including shipping.  I was hoping to set it up to a SBC and have it print out the news and weather every morning.  In other words, I'm not actually wanting to hook this up to my pc to use as a normal printer

The issue with that being, if you're using an emulator, you're not connected to real hardware. You may be able to fool the emulator into thinking it is real Atari hardware connected to a real Atari printer, but all you've really got is a virtual Atari running inside a PC with the PC connected to an Atari printer, assuming that were even possible. The best you would ever have would be the emulator passing printer commands and data to the operating system, Windows more than likely, then Windows would need to be able to communicate with the Atari printer to be able to pass the data properly from the emulator. This would require some sort of driver for the Atari printer on the PC.

 

I'm sure all of this is possible, but I doubt there's anything out there working now.

 

Good luck.

 

Edited February 5, 2020 by bfollowell

[Rybags]

I don't think XFormer is in active development any more.  It's been around for about 20 years and hasn't been a prominent emulator for the last 15.

[bfollowell]

Actually, XFormer has been around since it started on the ST 30 years ago! Hard to believe I know. Also, they actually came out with a new version about a year or so ago. It's completely new, rebuilt from the ground up, but I've never really used it. I doubt that it works with the old XFormer cable for peripherals though.

 

[adam242]

Somewhat off-topic, but I've always wanted to use an Apple Imagewriter II with my Atari. Anyone ever do something like that?

[+Stephen]

Pretty sure it's just a regular parallel port dot matrix.  Any of the available P:R devices should do it in theory.  I don't know who built those printers, but they were absolute tanks.