VOGONS


First post, by 1nanoprobe

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One retro computing experience that most of us don't have anymore is printing, and for good reason. The printers are bulky, can be a pain to maintain, or may take special papers or inks.

To recreate that experience in a "practical" way, I've often wondered if a point-of-sale (receipt) printer could be used like a mini dot matrix. I'm talking about the older style impact printers, not thermal printers. Some have a parallel interface, and it seems like they should at least be able to output plain text. Isn't that all a really basic receipt is? It looks like it, but honestly, I don't know.

Anyway, I have no idea which models might work better for this or how functional a POS printer would even be. Do they use the same protocols as dot matrix? Do they need special drivers or software? It would be thrilling enough to be able to hit Print Screen and get a physical print out of a directory listing. But of course what would be really cool would be the ability to print out mini banners from Print Shop or clipart-laden, rich documents from WordPerfect, all in miniature.

I know nothing about POS printers, so this may be a bunch of nonsense. Does anyone have experience or advice to offer?

Reply 1 of 5, by Anonymous Coward

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The best thing to do is avoid piece of shit printers.

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Reply 3 of 5, by Vynix

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I'm not an expert on Point-of-Sale (and not Piece of Sh*t) stuff nor printers, but if the printer's got a LPT interface and has DOS drivers (again, I never used a LPT port printer), it should work.. Unless it can work transparently like a dot matrix printer and doesn't need drivers.

That said, I recall that some thermal ones could do some advanced graphics (not just plain text), I never saw the older impact ones.

Proud owner of a Shuttle HOT-555A 430VX motherboard and two wonderful retro laptops, namely a Compaq Armada 1700 [nonfunctional] and a HP Omnibook XE3-GC [fully working :p]

Reply 4 of 5, by BitWrangler

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Most receipt printers aren't going to have enough columns for generic compatibility, they'd be around 30-50 (super old ones maybe only 5), whereas 80 column was standard in the dot matrix days. Now, most parallel printers, even inkjets and laser jets, up through the 90s and probably into 2000s had a generic compatibility mode, which was Epson FX-80 compatibility mode, basic text, so they'd work with a print screen from a text screen, or copying a text file to lpt, or simple print commands from inside DOS programs. However, if you have DOS progs running in CGA 40 column mode and hit print screen, then I guess you might get something almost right out of a 40+ column receipt printer, bearing in mind that it might not print the graphics characters (Only standard ascii or ansi or it's own custom character set) so you might get a bunch of question marks instead of graphics characters.

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Reply 5 of 5, by 1nanoprobe

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Thanks. Good to know it could work but with limitations. Next time I come across cheap a parallel receipt printer, I'll pick one up and see what it can do.