Printer emulator for Atari ST

  • It's an idea I've had for a while, and I've kinda-sorta attempted to wrap my head around what it would really take to drive a project like this to completion. I'll just copy the relevant information from my website:

    Quote

    The goal is to make a device that plugs into the Atari ST printer port, and can be recognized by TOS as a printer for all intents and purposes, but it actually just spits out a PostScript or a PDF file which you can send to your actual (modern) printer.

    This is tricky because very few ST programs actually grokked PostScript. I think what we need to do is to emulate a Diablo printer but translate the Diablo nstructions to PostScript under the hood.

    Sometimes I feel like an outsider even among retro computing folks because of my enthusiasm for *word processing* of all things -- it's not glamorous or sexy like games, hah. But I honestly would love to have a little hardware gizmo that can do all the above. In practice, I have multiple workarounds to (mostly) achieve what I'm trying to achieve, but it's not streamlined, and the results on paper still don't look quite right.

    Just wanted to share one of my more intriguing project ideas here!

    (Edit: Should I have posted this to The Outlet forum instead?)

  • Sometimes I feel like an outsider even among retro computing folks because of my enthusiasm for *word processing* of all things -- it's not glamorous or sexy like games, hah. But I honestly would love to have a little hardware gizmo that can do all the above. In practice, I have multiple workarounds to (mostly) achieve what I'm trying to achieve, but it's not streamlined, and the results on paper still don't look quite right.

    Just wanted to share one of my more intriguing project ideas here!

    Oh, this is really cool! The Atari ST stuff is still on my never-ending backlog - I only ever used it once in an emulator, but I don't really remember a lot of it since it was a few years ago.

    (Edit: Should I have posted this to The Outlet forum instead?)

    Yep - no worries though, I'm still trying to make the forum structure more intuitive. I moved the thread to The Outlet.

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