Home Page Forums MAME MAME Ap2000 signs of life

Managed to get DOS Instant Artist printing, seemed to get hung up on some of the lpt status bits, specifically the paper out bit, so ^ 0x20 seemed to fix it.

That's cool. The IW2 was serial only though, so I'm not quite understanding the LPT aspect Also, I had no idea the IW2 was supported by software on non-Apple systems.

ImageWriter II is well-supported on Windows at least until Windows XP. You can get a Bitronics-RS422 bridge to use it on an LPT port if you really want to. "Standard" Windows printer drivers assume that the same high-level byte-oriented protocol can be used to communicate with a printer whether it's on a parallel port (Bitronics or ECP), serial, or a TCP socket connection. You can thank HP for pioneering the nybble-oriented Bitronics back-channel, and their dumb print server modules that just exposed that to a TCP socket.

Since most printers are byte-oriented, perhaps we could have a parallel to serial converter and a serial to parallel converter.

Then you could use the ap2000 on a system that only supports serial, for example.

I made a serial luaprinter and added it to nano src/devices/bus/isa/com.cpp so you can do this:

(I did a MODE COM2:9600,N,8,1 before launching instant artist just for good measure)







I was going to see if I could get the coco3 to do the luaprinter (maybe getting a CGP-220 driver going) but it freezes up on a PRINT #-2. Also there's some strange double screen action going on.

I changed the baud rate of the serial printer to 2400 in the source code and could get bytes from the c64 but only on the user port channel 2.

Printers are supposed to be on channel 4 or 5 on the c64 iec bus, however there aren't any iec drivers that work, there's vic1515 but it's just a skeleton.

I was really keen on trying to get an okimate 20 print going, since its graphics commands are pretty simple and I had always wanted an oki.

I can get the user port to connect and send bytes.





But the c64 wants printers on 4...



I did find an okimate 20 apple2 disc on archive but it was in a2r format.

I found an article that mentioned printer drivers for Atari ST Degas and it has a bunch of different drivers for different dot matrix printers.

Hacking on a lua script made it output something recognizable for an Okimate 20.

Consulting the document "MCS-820_Printer_Handbook_(aka_Okimate_20).pdf" was indispensable.

So let's see if we can get windows 3.1 to print something.

After some fits and starts, win 3.1 installed with "SETUP /I" which disables the hardware detection.

And the ap2000 works with the Epson FX-80 driver. Cool!



and I tried the luaprinter with the c-itoh 8510 driver as I couldn't find an imagewriter II driver anywhere for windows 3.1. Unfortunately the 8510 driver doesn't do color.



Interestingly, it complained about paper being out for the luaprinter but not the ap2000, so I did the ^0x20 to the status just to get it to work.

Just for fun, I added a buffer indicator to the ap2000. The buffer size is shown by the little green bars in the upper left of the printout. Each bar represents a hex digit of the size. It's kinda fun to watch the bars grow and shrink as the buffer fills and clears.

It's also a good indicator of whether the system is properly respecting the busy/ack signals as it will never use the buffer if so.

Adding output_perror(0) seems to fix the paper out problems:


So let's see if Geos 2.0 will print something:

And if win3.1 works, why not try win 95?

(installing from floppies and using the file manager is so tedious! but it works!)

Luaprinter:



Ap2000: