First post, by Muz
Does modern printer works for retro computers? USB port, etc...
Does modern printer works for retro computers? USB port, etc...
It Depends,
my Epson dot matrix works fine
Sure. Mabye. No. Yes. Unknown. 42
How retro are we talking about? If you have USB ports (even 1.x) and an OS with USB support (Windows 95 OSR 2.1 or Windows 98) then… maybe, depending on driver availability.
I can print to my LaserJet 4100 via NetWare from DOS, OS/2, Classic Mac, Windows 3.x, 9x, NT, etc. Its not exactly a modern printer (made in 2001) but if it has any special support for these older operating systems I'm not using it. What it does have is a network port and an understanding of PostScript - with those two things it should be possible to print to it from pretty much anything.
In my setup, Windows 3.1/MacOS/DOS/whatever send print jobs to my NetWare Server. The NetWare server queues the print jobs and sends them on to the printer over the network using the LPD protocol which the printer speaks natively. If the printer didn't speak the LPD protocol (or didn't have a network interface) this could probably be fixed by software running on a raspberry pi. Mars NWE (a netware server clone, kind of like samba) on a Pi might alone be sufficient but I've never tried it. But I have NetWare setup to provide network drives to vintage computers - its printing abilities are just a bonus. It would be a lot of effort to setup something like that if printing was all I was after and I wasn't using it for anything else.
So can a modern printer work on a retro computer? To some extent it depends on how cheap the printer is but the likely answer is "probably" but its really a question of if you can be bothered setting up a bunch of extra bits to make it work.
Set up something to print to a network share and then have a newer computer monitor that shar for any files and when a file appears it prints and then delete the file.
Universal print server to print from any OS to any printer.