Lightbulb police? (was RE: Anyone off to VCF-UK)

[Tony Duell]

> Later, TRS232 came out with a trivial to use serial printer interface that
> ran off of the cassette port!  GPA made a similar one that plugged into

But which presuambly needed special drivers that were OS-dependant. At 
least with the Radio Shcak board, you could use the standard LDOS serial 
port drivers.

> the expansion port.

I suspect, had I been desparate, I would haev hung a parellel-to-serial 
converter (a handful of TTL chips) off the normal printer port..

> > Alas (for those of us with CX engined printers which can't be replaced by
> > anything more modern [1]), they haven't been made for many years.
> > [1] Such as the CX-VDO, the one with the direct interface to the print
> > engine and no formatter board. It's used on the PERQ, Atari ST (?), Acorn
> > Archimedes. etc.
> 
> Also Cordata/Corona Data Systems, Eiconscript, and Jlaser
> I used a DC37 switch box.

Yep.. I still have my printed catalogue of CX printers, parts, options, 
etc for The PrinterWorks :-)

> 
> Tall Tree Systems (Jlaser, JRAM, etc.) sold an adapter to connect to SX
> printer engines!

There was an official Canon SX-VDO printer. It had a simple PCB (mostly 
buffer chips) that connected to the DC controller board in place of the 
formater. It was mostly compatible with the CX-VDO, but not totally IIRC.

Some compnay (I forget who) did a VDO interface that fitted in the 
optional interface slot of an HP LJ2 (or similar) printer. I have neve 
seen this one.

-tony