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Is there a card that doesn’t handshake correctly?

Also, according to the schematics, it ignores the R/W line for CnXX and C800 accesses. Is that a normal thing to do? The ROM would be enabled while the CPU’s trying to drive the bus. Would it damage anything? Would it affect subsequent open bus reads? Is it just hoping software is well-behaved and doesn’t write there? Is it worth implementing write_cnxx to select the low ROM bank?

The a2 parallel card firmware will write data to the printer and doesn't check the ack.

The ap2000 will sometimes not watch the incoming data while it's printing and it'll drop characters.

If I put a buffer in between to handle the data when it drops, the data gets through eventually when the printer can handle it.

Other systems like the Amiga, and PC will check the ack or busy before sending a new character.

Enabling ROM while the CPU's driving was somewhat common on the A2, and the 74XX chips involved generally were tough enough not to care. We know that Apple internally used writes to various system ROM addresses to cause an ICE to log specific events.

Regarding the handshaking, the Apple parallel card doesn't handshake properly with the AP2000. I spent a significant amount of time fighting with it and couldn't get it to work reliably. Part of it was MAME time slicing: you write a character to the printer, and the printer's CPU doesn't get a chance to latch the character and drive the busy line before the next time the 6502 goes to write something, but there was more to it than that.

OK, there seem to be multiple Apple parallel interfaces: the Parallel Printer Card and the Parallel Interface Card. The latter is a far more complex beast than the Grappler+. I’ll try to find some time to take a look at it and see if we’re missing something.

Grappler Plus seems to work well with Triple-Dump.

Setting DPI to 120x72 and magnify x to 3 and y to 5, you get a printout of 8.0 inch wide (192*5/120) by 11.667 (280*3/72) inches high, just a little bit bigger than a page.



Paper Graphics works too:

The good news is, I can see what’s wrong with the Apple Parallel Interface Card. The bad news is, I need to find a day to sit down and try and sort it out.

Thanks again Vas for your work on the Grappler Plus! (makes Arsenio Hall audience noises)

testing out fontrix (printing the "DEMO GRAFFILE" file from v1.55)



printed at magnification 1x, then 2x:



Fontrix supports color printing too:

Grafix Pro (which is a simple mac paint clone) uses just CTRL+I codes to do its screen dumps, and works with the Grappler Plus.

You have to type CTRL+O CTRL+M to enter a carriage return into the text box.

ctrl+I GDERI ctrl+M will do double/emphasized/rotated/inverted

ESC while loading will allow you to choose keyboard/mouse/joystick/tablet.

Having fun trying everything out:

Let's make Signs and Banners (Printmaster) seems to like Generic Parallel for the Grappler Plus.

Selecting GrapplerPlus puts some text garbage on the output.