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Vintage Computer - Modern(ish) Printer

J

jjandersoj

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Apr 28, 2018
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79
Location
Clinton, MA
Hi Guys,

I have come a long way on restoring my Vintage Kaypro 10.

So I started to think about a parallel printer, hmm.

Vintage Printers are not so awesome, old mechanical moving parts etc.

I know that many newer printers, such as the HP Laserjet Series, can be accessed in "compatibility mode", hmm this might help.

Have any of you guys tinkered around with printing into the "modern" world?

Before I go down the rat hole of a 30 year old Epson-FX80 from eBay (or similar), I just wanted to throw it out.

Anybody played with this kind of thing and come up with something that works?

Long live Wordstar!

John-A Boston (Kaypro 10 Dude)
 
Compatibility mode? Most printers with a Centronics interface print the same as they always did. Frankly, I don't find any modern printers more reliable than old dot matrix ones, or any impact printer for that matter as long as it is tractor feed, not friction feed. But any LaserJet that has a Centronics port will work, as well as any other printer that you can directly connect to a Kaypro.
 
For my simulations I created an emulation of a Diablo 630 which produces postscript approximations of the printed pages. You'd have to get your Kaypro printer (serial or parallel) connected to a host PC that can run the java Diablo630 emulation, then there is some work on the emulation that may be needed:

1) I only emulate enough for Magic Wand to work, and so the "word processing" features are not implemented since Magic Wand uses micro-spacing to do all of it's fancy printing. I believe WordStar does expect the printer to perform things like bold, underline, and centering. But I did not use WordStar, so am not certain.

2) I was obsessed with using 14x11 "forms", and JAVA Print did not allow custom paper sizes, so I did a lot of hacking. We'd probably want to rip that out.

3) There will need to be a wrapper that reads the physical port and relays the data stream to the emulation. This is pretty simple, but you'll need to decide on how to get the data to the host PC. Redirecting printing on the Kaypro to a serial port would be the easiest, IMHO. Either way, JAVA is not great at directly accessing hardware and we might need to do something in C/C++ or ... There is a "rogue" JAVA plugin for Serial Ports that seems decent, not sure about parallel ports.

Some other options are to put a legacy printer emulation in something like a raspberry Pi and make the output match whatever modern printer you like (or postscript). Or write a printer driver for a host PC that recognizes the legacy printer codes (I'm not sure if those already exist) - you'll still need to connect the Kaypro printer to a host PC.

Let me know if you want to pursue the JAVA Diablo630 route.
 
KC9UDX said:
Compatibility mode? Most printers with a Centronics interface print the same as they always did. Frankly, I don't find any modern printers more reliable than old dot matrix ones, or any impact printer for that matter as long as it is tractor feed, not friction feed. But any LaserJet that has a Centronics port will work, as well as any other printer that you can directly connect to a Kaypro.
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Agreed, at least as regards the interface; the issue with some old software will be the lack of printer drivers for modern(ish) printers.
 
MikeS said:
Agreed, at least as regards the interface; the issue with some old software will be the lack of printer drivers for modern(ish) printers.
Click to expand...

Very true. I haven't printed formatted text since the early 1990s, so I never think about that. Daisy-wheel printers suffice for my uses.
 
Brother laser printers can emulate Epson FX printers making them handy for the occasional vintage printing requirement. It was easier a few years ago when they had many models with parallel interfaces; now, there is still some unsold stock of the parallel models but it is discontinued.
 
I always wonder how hard it would be to build a Centronics to Ethernet adaptor with a RPi. Shouldn't be too bad.
 
As far as i know there is a USB-parallel adapter. However You have to check if printer supports writing raw text, or write a new driver...
 
Someone suggested a long while back to get an sbc with an rs-232 port. Transfer files to it and print. Sbc's are not always cheap, or cheap enough, or are actual stand alone *single board computers*. It would be awful nice that have it set up as a headless print server so whatever it gets sent automatically prints. You can also find these thin clients on eBay pretty reasonably.
 
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KC9UDX said:
Compatibility mode? Most printers with a Centronics interface print the same as they always did. Frankly, I don't find any modern printers more reliable than old dot matrix ones, or any impact printer for that matter as long as it is tractor feed, not friction feed. But any LaserJet that has a Centronics port will work, as well as any other printer that you can directly connect to a Kaypro.
Click to expand...

Compatibility mode means sort of the same thing for printers as vt-100 or adm3a compatibility means for terminals, except on dot matrix printers it usually means compatibility with an older Epson standard which I really don't know about. Kaypro existed in the days of the dot matrix and CPM, which is why he was looking for an epson fx80.

I have a panasonic kx-1124 that I actually found for free one day, works fine and they still make ink cartridges for it as well as the perforated paper for it, both very cheap, because they're still used by many companies because a properly maintained dot matrix printer will never have a paper jam and can endlessly churn out pages with little maintenance. It has an epson compatibility mode and can be found for less than $50 plus shipping since companies were buying and maintaining them for years and are slowly retiring them. They are centronics, and I know my Kaypro-II has a centronics printer plug on the back, so if yours has the same you'd need a centronics-to-centronics cable.
 
2icebitn said:
Someone suggested a long while back to get an sbc with an rs-232 port. Transfer files to it and print. Sbc's are not always cheap, or cheap enough, or are actual stand alone *single board computers*. It would be awful nice that have it set up as a headless print server so whatever it gets sent automatically prints. You can also find these thin clients on eBay pretty reasonably.
Click to expand...

Its not an SBC at all, its an ethernet print server, and yeah you can buy one that would be all ready to set up for about as much as an RPi and the parts to cobble together a printer interface. Its a problem that was solved fifteen, maybe twenty years ago.
 
bifo86 said:
Its not an SBC at all, its an ethernet print server, and yeah you can buy one that would be all ready to set up for about as much as an RPi and the parts to cobble together a printer interface. Its a problem that was solved fifteen, maybe twenty years ago.
Click to expand...

Do you have an example of a device that connects to a computer as a serial or parallel printer and prints to an ethernet or USB printer?

I have thus far only seen devices that do the opposite.
 
I don't know what he's referring to. But to write software that causes an sbc to receive data and appear to the host as a printer, I suppose is quite possible. Most people would be happy sending a file over a serial connection and having the sbc natively print it out, as it has drivers that support the printer. I have 3 old pmmx *true* sbc's I've kept for such a purpose, that seem exactly the size of an Ampro Little Board, and have everything on board. Alternately you could just send the file to a modern PC or laptop using a USB to serial (or parallel) dongle and print that way.
 
I think the main reason to do something other than just transfer files is if you have some specialized CP/M program that generates the output you want, like a word processor or report generator (e.g. accounting or database apps). In that case you have a stream of bytes with ESC sequences for a particular antique printer model. You would need to convert the stream into something like PostScript - or some slightly less modern printer language. I'm pretty sure it's not practical to try and customize old CP/M programs to generate PostScript. Even HPGL might be a stretch.
 
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