Okimate screen print?

[toddtmw]

On 6/13/2020 at 6:48 PM, leech said:

Oh, that was just an insert.  Here is the actual disk label. 

1-800-OKI-DATA is still Oki Data customer support. You should call and ask if they can send you a new disk on the printer you just opened. 

[leech]

1 hour ago, toddtmw said:

1-800-OKI-DATA is still Oki Data customer support. You should call and ask if they can send you a new disk on the printer you just opened. 

"Yes, I would like the DOS 3 disk..."  someone should do this and record it, would be pretty funny.  It is pretty cool they are one that has stayed around for so long.  So many companies that made great stuff in the 80s simply disappeared.

[retrobits]

I had one of those for my atari st in college. Produced awesome color prints. I would think the ribbon cartridges are hard to come by these days. 

[jamm]

Hey @leech - did you have any luck getting the machine going?  It'd be great to start collecting some sample output from an Oki10 to use as a basis for emulation work, but I haven't seen any A8 users with a working device.

 

[toddtmw]

I have one that works but these do not print well on standard paper and thermal transfer paper is hard to find these days. Especially tractor feed. 

[jamm]

21 minutes ago, toddtmw said:

I have one that works but these do not print well on standard paper and thermal transfer paper is hard to find these days. Especially tractor feed. 

Yes, I remember all too well. What you really need is some glossy/smooth paper.  I wonder how well glossy inkjet paper would take that thermal transfer material.  Do you still have color "ink" cartridges?

 

[toddtmw]

1 minute ago, jamm said:

Yes, I remember all too well. What you really need is some glossy/smooth paper.  I wonder how well glossy inkjet paper would take that thermal transfer material.  Do you still have color "ink" cartridges?

 

Thermal transfer ribbons. ?

 

yep. I got a couple of NOS ones a while back, I think. 

[toddtmw]

The thing that bothered me about this printer is that when I printed pictures, anything white came out grey. It’s like it wouldn’t just let the white paper be white. 

[leech]

1 hour ago, jamm said:

Hey @leech - did you have any luck getting the machine going?  It'd be great to start collecting some sample output from an Oki10 to use as a basis for emulation work, but I haven't seen any A8 users with a working device.

 

Waiting for the Oki10 to show up.  Should be Monday.  Any suggested programs to try printing in color?  I have been meaning to try out the 20 on the Ultimate64 that I have, but as I have never tried printing from that, I need to figure out what software to play with.

But for sure, would be sweet to get FujiNet to understand all the printer types right to convert to something that is standard now, like PCL6.

[jamm]

42 minutes ago, leech said:

Waiting for the Oki10 to show up.  Should be Monday.  Any suggested programs to try printing in color?  I have been meaning to try out the 20 on the Ultimate64 that I have, but as I have never tried printing from that, I need to figure out what software to play with.

But for sure, would be sweet to get FujiNet to understand all the printer types right to convert to something that is standard now, like PCL6.

The only programs I've seen that are able to print to the Oki10 are the ones they provide on the disk.

 

[zzip]

Okimate 10--    wow that brings back some bad memories!   Extremely slow,  short ink life,  mine was unusable within two years.

 

As others mentioned,  yes you do need some kind of glossy paper.  In the 80s, I found that photocopier paper worked..   you could feed individual sheets without the tractor feed.    Common computer paper at the time was not glossy and rather coarse.   Printer paper today is a lot smoother and would probably work better than the 80s stuff.

 

 

Edited June 22, 2020 by zzip
spelling fix

[leech]

58 minutes ago, zzip said:

Okimate 10--    wow that brings back some bad memories!   Extremely slow,  short ink life,  mine was unusable within two years.

 

As others mentioned,  yes you do need some kind of glossy paper.  In the 80s, I found that photocopier paper worked..   you could feed individual sheets without the tractor feed.    Common computer paper at the time was not glossy and rather coarse.   Printer paper today is a lot smoother and would probably work better than the 80s stuff.

 

 

Yeah, I was looking at ordering a fax paper roll and trying that out.  But of course need the actual printer and to find some programs to work with it. 

[Goochman]

Okimate 10 was a great idea poorly implemented.  The print head would get crushed if you used regular paper - but atleast it was easily replaceable.  The biggest drawback was the ink ribbon.  It had I believe 3 colors in a row which were as long as a line of paper.  The printer would pass through all the colors for each line so if you had 0 or just a pixel of yellow you just used that whole piece of ribbon.  Printing color just killed its usefulness.  With the black ribbon it looked good but was very slow.  I got a Panasonic KXP 1081 or 1091 shortly after my Okimate debacle.

[zzip]

17 hours ago, Goochman said:

Okimate 10 was a great idea poorly implemented.  The print head would get crushed if you used regular paper - but atleast it was easily replaceable.  The biggest drawback was the ink ribbon.  It had I believe 3 colors in a row which were as long as a line of paper.  The printer would pass through all the colors for each line so if you had 0 or just a pixel of yellow you just used that whole piece of ribbon.  Printing color just killed its usefulness.  With the black ribbon it looked good but was very slow.  I got a Panasonic KXP 1081 or 1091 shortly after my Okimate debacle.

Yeah, and you could not really reuse the ribbon more than once, unlike ink ribbons.   The 'ink' was wax that got melted onto the paper.   Once a secton of wax was missing from the ribbon, that section could not print again.  

 

We got one because it seemed to check all the boxes.  There weren't many color dot matrix printers, especially not for the Atari 8-bit, and it was fairly inexpensive too!  There was a few things thermal transfer could do that other print technologies couldn't.   I seem to recall that you could make T-shirt iron-ons with this printer?   But for everyday print needs, it was pretty awful.

[leech]

2 hours ago, zzip said:

Yeah, and you could not really reuse the ribbon more than once, unlike ink ribbons.   The 'ink' was wax that got melted onto the paper.   Once a secton of wax was missing from the ribbon, that section could not print again.  

 

We got one because it seemed to check all the boxes.  There weren't many color dot matrix printers, especially not for the Atari 8-bit, and it was fairly inexpensive too!  There was a few things thermal transfer could do that other print technologies couldn't.   I seem to recall that you could make T-shirt iron-ons with this printer?   But for everyday print needs, it was pretty awful.

I was actually thinking of getting some Iron on transfer paper for it!

[A8Watcher_808]

On 6/20/2020 at 1:34 PM, toddtmw said:

The thing that bothered me about this printer is that when I printed pictures, anything white came out grey. It’s like it wouldn’t just let the white paper be white. 

From what I can remember, there was a slider on the printer for darkness. On some thermal paper, if you set it at the darkest setting, you would get that grey color so you would need to adjust it to get the perfect setting.

[Kyle22]

I used a Star NX1000r, compatible w/ Epson JX80. If this is even remotely compatible w/ Epson, I would like to figure this out and re-make into a new PicPrint+ that runs under SDX.

Unless I can find that stupid BASIC boot disk YEMACYB. It had some nice assembly code. Awful proggie, but nice dithering ASM code for P:.

The original PicPrint+ was designed for SDX, BTW.

Protection on the original YEMACYB disk was trivial, BTW. Booted BASIC, Variable names obfuscated. It was an easy rip/hack.

It is sad that I lost all of that code long ago.

:)

 

[zzip]

9 hours ago, Kyle22 said:

I used a Star NX1000r, compatible w/ Epson JX80. If this is even remotely compatible w/ Epson, I would like to figure this out and re-make into a new PicPrint+ that runs under SDX.

 

I don't think the Okimate 10 was Epson compatible.    But I seem to remember it used a similar scheme to address the individual pins.

[Goochman]

Okimate 10 was not Epson compatible, but was the precursor to being a "Ribbon" company vs a printer company like HP has become

[leech]

3 hours ago, Goochman said:

Okimate 10 was not Epson compatible, but was the precursor to being a "Ribbon" company vs a printer company like HP has become

I did see that MagniPrint II+ supported the Okimate ML 92A and I think it was 92B?  Not sure if they are compatible at all.

Anyone know of a SIO 'packet sniffer' we could use to reverse engineer the printer commands?  Or would just going through the Okimate disk images be easier?

[jamm]

2 hours ago, leech said:

I did see that MagniPrint II+ supported the Okimate ML 92A and I think it was 92B?  Not sure if they are compatible at all.

Anyone know of a SIO 'packet sniffer' we could use to reverse engineer the printer commands?  Or would just going through the Okimate disk images be easier?

Note that FujiNet is able to dump the raw contents sent to the printer over to a file, so that will serve as a 'packet sniffer' unless bi-directional communication is required.

Beyond that there's documentation out there, not the least of which is the programs on the disk.

 

I doubt figuring out or documenting the printer command set will be difficult.  The more challenging part will be recreating the look/feel of the original printer, as @jeffpiep has done wonderfully with the other printer emulations currently in FujiNet.  For that we'll need good scans of actual output, and for that we'll need at least one person with a working printer...

 

 

Edited June 25, 2020 by jamm

[leech]

Just now, jamm said:

Note that FujiNet is able to dump the raw contents sent to the printer over to a file, so that will serve as a 'packet sniffer' unless bi-directional communication is required.

Beyond that there's documentation out there, not the least of which is the programs on the disk.

 

I doubt figuring out or documenting the printer command set will be difficult.  The more challenging part will be recreating the look/feel of the original printer, as @jeffpiep has done wonderfully with the other printer emulations currently in FujiNet.  For that we'll need good scans of actual output, and for that we'll need at least one person with a working printer...

 

 

I will hopefully have time to test mine out this coming weekend, so hopefully it works!  Do we have something I can test print to see a comparison or something?  There are pages on Atari mania that are examples that come with the plug n print adapter.

[jamm]

Just now, leech said:

I will hopefully have time to test mine out this coming weekend, so hopefully it works!  Do we have something I can test print to see a comparison or something?  There are pages on Atari mania that are examples that come with the plug n print adapter.

Yes, and whatever other pictures/videos exist online. I know there are at least a couple of videos of the printer in operation on Youtube.

 

I imagine there are a number of test programs on the utility disk.  If you get it working, it'd be very helpful if you could print out full character sets using all the font sizes/effects the printer offers.  Some decent scans of that would serve as the basis for a custom font to maintain the original look in emulation.

 

[zzip]

19 hours ago, leech said:

I did see that MagniPrint II+ supported the Okimate ML 92A and I think it was 92B?  Not sure if they are compatible at all.

Anyone know of a SIO 'packet sniffer' we could use to reverse engineer the printer commands?  Or would just going through the Okimate disk images be easier?

I thought all the printer commands were in the Okimate 10 manual?   They used to document crazy stuff like that BITD :)

[leech]

29 minutes ago, zzip said:

I thought all the printer commands were in the Okimate 10 manual?   They used to document crazy stuff like that BITD

Yeah, I was trying to look at that, but got inevitably distracted by work and other things and ended up putting the plug n print back in its box so I had table room for when the family showed up for Father's day.  Holy crap my old man is old!