TI parallel -> PC serial -> regular printer howto interest?

[ckoba]

So I have a lot of accumulated gear downstairs. Most of it tends to be cast-offs from various places I've worked (I had a wall of SGI workstations at one point, a Sun E250, and a bunch of sun4ms).

 

Every two years or so, my wife tours my side of the basement with me and asks me what X device is used for. If I can't come up with a reasonable answer, it gets pitched in the trash. (She doesn't touch the VW parts -- she knows how hard it is to get even Brazil-made parts nowadays for a Type-III)

 

She's probably going to do the same thing in the next few weeks ... so I've been going through the bits-and-bobs boxes and winnowing the useful stuff.

 

I had a few different models of parallel->serial converters. Centronics on one end, DB25 on the other, and they worked. Since parallel printers are effectively unobtainable in the retail channel at this point, I decided to leverage the BBB-based tape player emulator I built (and documented) awhile back to build an all-singing, all-dancing print server.

 

It takes parallel output, turns it into postscript, and passes it along (via rlpr -- a wonderful, yet much overlooked tool) to a regular print server. And it handles Epson escape codes via an old e2ps filter I had lying around.

 

Is there interest in a white paper explaining how I threw this together, or is everyone printing via serial or extracting from .dsk now?

[+Ksarul]

This might actually be a very good thing to document--it would provide another avenue to connectivity, especially with that Epson filter in there, as a lot of TI software was formatted to use Epson codes when printing. . .so even a lot of the output files will have imbedded Epson coding.

[ckoba]

Okay, I'll have it up with a link to the software bits by the beginning of next week -- the software side is rough, and IMHO should be able to render to PCL via ghostscript as well (which seems to be a higher-quality emulation in the printers that I have here). Thanks for the feedback.

[ckoba]

This has been done. The writeup is at https://www.disavowed.jp/index.php?/archives/28-Printing-from-a-TI-to-a-modern-printer.html