Home Page Forums MAME MAME NLQ401 printer

This is from work done by FabioDL on the sp400 printer.


It's quite fun to play with, it will print 80 characters if you print text as graphics, otherwise it is limited to 38 chars.

It's kinda fun to have both the sp400 and the ap2000 online simultaneously.

You can switch from the sp400 to the ap2000 with
CONSOLE ,,,,1
CONSOLE ,,,,2 (for the ap2000)

you can also do HCOPY to do a screen dump
HCOPY 2 will do a screen dump of a graphics screen to the ap2000
HCOPY 2,3 will do it double size


so for example to make a screen dump of a graphics screen:

90 CONSOLE ,,,,2
100 SCREEN 2,2
110 CIRCLE (128,90),50
120 HCOPY 2,3


./mame sf7000 -sgexp:sk1100:printer sp400 -centronics ap2000 basic11

Ran across the PRT-MPF printer for the MicroProfessor 1b (mpf1b), and it looks pretty simple.

It's actually quite a simple design, the carriage moves forward and then returns while feeding the paper for a single line.

Two io addresses are used, CA and CB where one address controls the motor and the thermal head elements, and the other reads the home position and the motor "tacho generator pulse".

I managed to get it to do something that looks recognizable:

prt-mpf disassembly

and comparing it to actual output:

Excellent! Did you send patches to mamedev github about Commodore printer/plotters?

Does anyone make ROM dumps from Atari 1020 plotter? I have Atari 2020 field service manual (thanks for PDF link). If not, I will make ROM dumps and send them to you some day.

I made ROM dumps from NX2420 24-pin color printer and have technical manual (includes schematics). Someone sent me a copy of NX1000 multi-font ROM dumps.

I was working on MX80 emulation but ROM dump for 41A slave processor is bad (first 2 bytes were overlaid with register value). I need a good copy of 41A ROM dump. My USB EPROM programmer does not support MCS-41/48 series.

I did make a full mirror of Zimmers archive includes printer ROM dumps and manuals.

Tim

That is not nice. There are PDF function calls in Qt development package so that you can generate paper layer like bars, blank, etc. (kind of papers) then draw results on that layer. It can display results on screen as real-time and save finished page into PDF file. That should be results on background layer with holes at end sides.

For example, look at Virtual1403 on GitHub that produces PDF files with paper layer as background like bars, etc.

Tim

I gather the "death penalty" means no slot machine TITO emulation can happen for quite some time. Slot machine printers predate the modern barcoded thermal tickets too, the machines used to print out dot-matrix tickets on plain paper that you had to manually take to the cashier to convert to cash and couldn't insert back into a machine.

"You really like making things more complicated than they need to be, don’t you? Take a step back and think."

I have thought about how my life is a lot more complicated than it should be and whether it's worth it to try to get anything accepted into master.

Supposedly open source projects are about collaboration but there seems to be a desire to have everything 100% perfect before it goes in.

Sometimes perfect is the enemy of the good. (or the okay)

The bitmap printer isn't the greatest code ever, but it could easily be replaced.
Once the mythical page device becomes available, there's only a few lines of code that have to be changed.
(You know, like code gets changed all the time without having the "death penalty", and this dates back to late 2021)


So nothing is allowed to go in until that page device is here which is quite frustrating and deflating and discouraging.

There I've said my piece.

It's surprising how much fun it is to work on the datamaster with jlopezm who's enthusastic versus the hostility that I perceive from comments like the above.

If you have stuff that isn't dumped or docs not archived get them up on archive.org or something. No one can do anything if you don't put them out there....