Hello all. I have a few printer questions, but 1st, the overall situation I'm dealing with:

I have an Amiga 1200, towered, and networked with a residental wifi router. My wife has an XP box, also on the network. And there is 1 BJC-210 printer connected to my Amiga.
The problems are:
The 210 is built like a tank, had it over 10 years, and has worked flawlessly for that time. But now, the paper tray doesn't separate the sheets (forcing me to manually load 1 sheet at a time), a good quality resume takes 5-10 minutes to print (1 page), and my wife has no direct access to it. (I installed a bjc-210 driver on windows, print it to a file on a file server, and type "copy smbfs0:whatever.prn par:" on the amiga. If there's a better way to do this, please let me know) Plus, the reason I'm printing resumes is because I'm rather between jobs, and US$40+ per cartridge is a bit much to hack.

Anyway, I know theres a network printer driver on Aminet, which I've tried to use via UAE when a net printer was available, but to no avail. I think it'll work on the 1200T, though. And Walmart has various USB and wireless printers available. I was wondering if anybody here had tried such a beast, with any success? I would love to do things this way, as I can just plop it in the living room (1/2 the way between my computer and hers), punch in the WEP/SSID crap, install drivers and be done with it. A Lexmark would be ideal, due to the cheap nature of the ink they use.

Otherwise, I have a SubWay USB in the 1200, and perhaps there's a printer that will work with that? Thanks for any help.

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@kvasir

Hi, if your printer just has a paper feed problem, maybe all it needs (after ten years) is a good clean.

Does your wifi/router also have an ethernet port? if so an ethernet to parallel print server (cheaper than a wifi one) would be an easy way for both of you to use it.

Perhaps others can help with knowledge of working printers.

Richard

@Draby

Yeah, but the ethernet ports (except the ones on the 10mbps switch that I have for the 1200 via PCMCIA and the 486) are all taken. The wifi would just be easier to set up, the way the house is laid out would make it difficult to run more cable. But in a pinch I could do it. (I have unused linksys and belkin routers with available 100mbps ports, could set them up as bridges) I'll have a crack at cleaning the 210 out, but the amount of stuff I'm printing makes for a bit of a wait. Though with the paper feed working, I could just que up the print jobs and watch a movie.

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@kvasir

Well that sounds like a plan, especially the watching a movie bit.
Richard

OK, a while back my wife bought one of these (Kodak ESP 5250), which has NO drivers on the Amiga. Every one I've tried on the off-chance this thing has some sort of postscript or emulation mode fails miserably. Its connected via wifi through my router, and by using wireshark and existing windows/linux drivers, I've confirmed it uses port 9100, and have netprinter.device set up for that, plus its IP address, which I keep static.
I came up with a simple picture in MSPaint, saved it as a .bmp, and printed it via Ubuntu (which has a CUPS printer available for it). I captured the feed going to/from the computer and printers IP addresses on port 9100, split the dump into 2 file (computer->printer, printer-> computer), and copied them to the amiga.
I tried opening printer.device,0 as well as netprinter.device,0 (directly), and dumping the raw feed over hoping to "fool" the printer into thinking it was a linux machine printing to it. It didn't work. Nothing I've noticed in a hex editor mentions IP or MAC addresses, or any other spoof-proofing, so I'm thinkng its just a timing thing, printer is getting too much data.
Anyway, I did this by modifying some source code I found on Aminet (EZprinter.lha), basically added a *char to dump the raw file into. And then dump it into the send_text function in the code (uses DoIO() ).
Reason I'm posting this: even if this weird experiment would have worked, I would only be able to print by printing files to IFF, converting them to JBIG format (what the 5250 wants to see apparently), and typing something like "printkodak output.iff netprinter 0" or whatever arguments I wanted to put there.
I've tried looking into writing an actual printer driver, both with the ROM KERNEL book (which weighs a good 10 pounds), and by looking at other sample source code online. I've managed to give myself the kind of headache one would expect after a long night with lots of really cheap tequilla in my attempt to figure this out, and was wondering if anybody knew of a tutorial site, or had any advise on how to write a printer driver? I'd rather not access netprinter.device directly, as thats probably bad ju-ju, and these things can hook up via USB as well.

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@kvasir

Quote:

kvasir wrote: OK, a while back my wife bought one of these (Kodak ESP 5250), which has NO drivers on the Amiga. Every one I've tried on the off-chance this thing has some sort of postscript or emulation mode fails miserably. Its connected via wifi through my router, and by using wireshark and existing windows/linux drivers, I've confirmed it uses port 9100, and have netprinter.device set up for that, plus its IP address, which I keep static. I came up with a simple picture in MSPaint, saved it as a .bmp, and printed it via Ubuntu (which has a CUPS printer available for it). I captured the feed going to/from the computer and printers IP addresses on port 9100, split the dump into 2 file (computer->printer, printer-> computer), and copied them to the amiga. I tried opening printer.device,0 as well as netprinter.device,0 (directly), and dumping the raw feed over hoping to "fool" the printer into thinking it was a linux machine printing to it. It didn't work. Nothing I've noticed in a hex editor mentions IP or MAC addresses, or any other spoof-proofing, so I'm thinkng its just a timing thing, printer is getting too much data. Anyway, I did this by modifying some source code I found on Aminet (EZprinter.lha), basically added a *char to dump the raw file into. And then dump it into the send_text function in the code (uses DoIO() ). Reason I'm posting this: even if this weird experiment would have worked, I would only be able to print by printing files to IFF, converting them to JBIG format (what the 5250 wants to see apparently), and typing something like "printkodak output.iff netprinter 0" or whatever arguments I wanted to put there. I've tried looking into writing an actual printer driver, both with the ROM KERNEL book (which weighs a good 10 pounds), and by looking at other sample source code online. I've managed to give myself the kind of headache one would expect after a long night with lots of really cheap tequilla in my attempt to figure this out, and was wondering if anybody knew of a tutorial site, or had any advise on how to write a printer driver? I'd rather not access netprinter.device directly, as thats probably bad ju-ju, and these things can hook up via USB as well.

You're insane. - First point. ;-D (meant with affection btw yet, serious)
You may be splitting feed scraped from wire shark, but it's in IP mode, you'd have to remove all the IP protocol and error checking etc, god, even UDP which bypasses all that is not a good way, look forget it!.
I love the AMIGA too but there comes a time when your functionality outweighs the hardware and an upgrade is required.

A CHEAP ####d windows box, could be made on old hardware. I know Windows 2000 will run in 32MB of ram, I do this, and a pentium CPU which u could pick up for under $20 these days at a computer swap meet or market. Windows 2000 itself for less, prob get it for $5 I did.

That will have much better printer support out of the box and drivers can be found from the manufacturers site. If you're hard pressed for cash and are not after a gaming computer yet want legacy and functional printer drivers over IP or others, this will do it.

I run a 32MB ram pentium print server for my family. All it does is file storage for drivers/progs/mp3/movies and printing. It costs bugger all to run and is fanless. i remote in to it to change anything. It cost me prob all up $45 4 years ago. It's not fast, but it's faster than my AMIGA 4000 / 040-50.

When I use AMIGA, it's via WinUAE and that's fast. I run that on my AMD 4 core win7 PC.

IF you HATE windows and just completely refuse for no good reason other than being eccentric, hey, why not!, you can also go for the linux way, although, hate to say it, linux drivers will be harder to find for that kind of legacy printer and it's a bit of a fiddle in linux to get the older h/w to work esp in ubuntu. Shame on you Ubuntu. Linux used to be known for bringing older h/w back to a new use!

Wireshark filtering and scraping of data .... my god.... surprised you went that far!
put that kind of effort in to an old win2k box and maybe next you will be asking for help on trajectory for a Mars lander or something

That's my 5c worth.

Last edited by SHADES on 03-Nov-2010 at 07:55 AM.

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It's not the question that's the problem, it's the problem that's the question.

@kvasir

Quote:

and printed it via Ubuntu (which has a CUPS printer available for it).

At least you have a fallback option! ;)

Quote:

I captured the feed going to/from the computer and printers IP addresses on port 9100, split the dump into 2 file (computer->printer, printer-> computer), and copied them to the amiga. I tried opening printer.device,0 as well as netprinter.device,0 (directly), and dumping the raw feed over hoping to "fool" the printer into thinking it was a linux machine printing to it. It didn't work.

Well, the Amiga's "printer.device" cannot do anything with a captured network stream. Since you have the RKRMs, you can look up how the "printer.device" works, and how it is operated. Likewise, you should consult the "netprinter.device" documentation for protocol information.

Writing your own printer driver shouldn't be that hard. If you can get the Amiga developer disks from somewhere, there's a sample printer driver in it.

The Amiga printing system in "printer.device" uses either plain text or graphics, if I remember correctly. Graphics must be in the format supported by the printer, and handed over to "printer.device" with the appropriate procedure.

I haven't done any printing with the Amiga for over 10 years, so I cannot recall exactly how everything works. Best would be to read the documentation! :)

Interesting project! :)

@voyager2007

Quote:

Well, the Amiga's "printer.device" cannot do anything with a captured network stream. Since you have the RKRMs, you can look up how the "printer.device" works, and how it is operated. Likewise, you should consult the "netprinter.device" documentation for protocol information.

Yeah,, I kinda noticed that. Sniffy confirmed packets going through, but not much more. (2 packets, one sent to the printer, one sent back, probably complaining about me doing this lol)

Quote:

The Amiga printing system in "printer.device" uses either plain text or graphics, if I remember correctly. Graphics must be in the format supported by the printer, and handed over to "printer.device" with the appropriate procedure.

According to the manual, there's different "modules" that get compiled together, one has a list of commands for ansi->printer conversion, another has the info to convert printer.devices output to the printers input (JBIG in this case). The wireshark feed, while completely useless dumping straight to the printer, has been helpful with that. Luckily, the command structures are in plain english, too.

I've also tried to track down the Linux CUPS driver source code, though I'm either missing something, or its one of the sourceforge projects with no source... (I usually turn to Linux geeks when I get sick of reverse-engineering stuff )

Think the biggest prob I was having with this was doing it for 14 hours. Not a 17 year old geek with a 2 litre bottle of jolt near my computer. (33 year old geek with coffee you could use as motor oil instead). lol. I'll tinker with it some more today, though.

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