How to attach a printer to a SC794?

[Randy Merkel]

Sorry if this has been covered before, searching for 'printer' results in about a million hits ;)

Just looking to be able to print stuff in CP/M 2.2 or Z-System. Doesn't have to be an old printer with a parallel interface; kind of thinking of ït would be cool if ˆP worked."

-- Randy

[AngelaTheSephira]

Does the SC794 have a second UART? If so, a serial printer would work fine - you should be able to level-shift it to real RS232 and then punt the text to print out of COM1, but I don't know how Ctrl-P works...

[Randy Merkel]

I found another thread that said the second SIO port was the default CP/M LST device. Verified with a second serial to USB adapter attached to my Ubuntu laptop; connected with minicom logging to a file. PIP to LST appears in the log file, that I can ship off to my network printer. Kind of a pain, but it works!

Did some think about a application to copy the LST/log file to the printer, but realized that modern printers don’t function like old ASCII printers (print each character as it arrives), or line printers (print a line when a CR, LF arrives. They expect a job…

Digging around I found that Epson still makes old style printers like the LX 310. Note that I assume it’s just a send character and print. It does have serial and parallel interfaces… and uses tracker paper, something I haven seen in decades ;) All for ~$250 US. I might give it a try.

- Randy