I had an interesting meeting with Roy Brereton today, during which we discussed the problem of connecting modern printers to the QL. Now, one of the suggestions which has been banded around from the software side is for someone to collaborate with me in order to produce a new printer device, which could be used instead of PAR. That device would basically form a pipe between any program sending text output and ProWesS (ProForma driver) - provided that the input was in standard EPSON printer code format, it should be relatively easy to translate this to Proforma and thereby send graphic output to a printer. However, I did ask Roy Wood to check if ProWesS to print to a modern Epson windows only printer and he has not come back to me on this.. The other option which was broached, and which could form a new source of funding for QL projects and the QL community in general, would be to build a generic box, which could be connected to a parallel port. The box would perform the translation and output to a printer - I would suggest that it be programmed under Windows, as this would enable new printer drivers to be downloaded to the box quite easily. The box would take standard Epson (or HP) ASCII output and convert it to the Windows driver in order to print to the printer. The box would ideally need to support USB printers as well as parallel printers. Now, we appreciate that this would be expensive and may in fact be too complex to create on a small scale. However, it could be sold not only to the QL community, but to all the other computers which cannot currently handle Windows only printers, such as the Spectrum, and even the kids computer (Powernet 2000) which is currently sold by Argos and Toys R Us. This would surely be a large market which we could support. Any thoughts or comments on this from the hardware and Windows savvy parts of the community?? It just seemed a feasible alternative... -- Rich Mellor RWAP Services 35 Chantry Croft, Kinsley, Pontefract, West Yorkshire, WF9 5JH TEL: 01977 610509 Visit our website at URL:http://www.rwapsoftware.co.uk
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