printer dumping sound

[newTIboyRob]

So I am in the process of resurrecting my 800XL, that is, if I can get the dang space bar to work again. But it has been working well in the past with a nice PR connection to an Epson printer, and it printed wonderfully. I was watching War Games recently, and you might recall that there was a scene where David prints out whatever was on the screen to his dot matrix printer, but you will notice that the printer made the exact sound, letter by letter, as each letter was printed on the printer- almost like the clicking sound of a slow typewriter, letter by letter. If you watch that scene you will know what I mean. Somehow, though molasses-slow, I thought it was kind of cool actually.

 

Anyone know of a way to do this in a BASIC program?  The XL->Epson connection moves way faster than that, so this would have to be some kind of a slow down nelly command in there and maybe a string concept and LEN concept along with it providing some kind of a delay,  so that the communication literally really slows down between screen output and printer output. This would yield exactly what the combo was doing in the movie.

 

Any thoughts or a even a program here?  I am not as familiar with ATARI basic as with other systems.

 

Thanks in advance!

 

[_The Doctor__]

Just use a daisy wheel printer.

[Rybags]

Not sure if it's straightforward.  I'm fairly sure CIO output to the printer occurs a line at a time, ie it gets buffered until either the buffer is full or EOL ($9B) is encountered.

I don't have a printer or emulated real P: available at the moment so can't verify this.

[_The Doctor__]

in graphics mode you could do a blip at a time.

[newTIboyRob]

Doc, I would have loved to have that daisy wheel printer in the movie!   So you mentioned Graphics mode, blip at a time. I am trying to figure out how that would fit in here.

I would also need a GRAPHICS line in the program I would think, but wouldn't know which one to choose:

 

5 GRAPHICS..... # ?

10 ?"HELLO, DOC. YOUR WISH IS MY COMMAND."

20 ?"THESE LINES WILL PRINT TO THE PRINTER BLIP BY BLIP, PER YOUR COMMAND."

30 ?"THIS LINE IS SHORTER THAN THE LAST BUT LONGER THAN THE FIRST."

40 END

 

...what's missing here?

 

[TGB1718]

What the "Doc" was eluding to is sending the characters to the printer in Graphics mode not character mode.

 

For this you would need to convert the characters into their graphical counterparts and send appropriate commands

to the printer to put it into Graphics mode.

 

 

[newTIboyRob]

Ok thank you for the guide.