Having gotten nmy new AmigaOne 500 the way I want it, (well, a 2TB SSD would be nice but that is WAY overkill) I'm faced with just the problem of software. And drivers.

Namely, the day after I bought this PPC board I replced my Brother MFC 435W with an HP OfficeJet Pro 8610. It's wired, and wireless. Printer address is xx.xx.1.4, and I can access this page from the Amiga with no problem.

What I CAN'T do is print from the Amig, either wired with USB or over the network. Aside from the usbprinter.device, do I need anything special, like the hp-photosmart driver?

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@StantheAmigaMan

I sympathise fella am in the same boat and tried a Hp laserjet 2600n and couldn't get it work via network or lpr or by usb using any of the drivers or via postscript

I went and bought a cheap 1102w laserjet and now cloud print from my Amiga via email....its not ideal but neither is the lack of printer support

Anyone with a sam460/Amigaone500 and a recently purchased printer can recommend options and setups??

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@outrun1978

Hmm...I'm using a HP CP1514n via ethernet since ages with all of my systems - both PCL or Postscript works via lpr.device or netprinter.device. (BTW: "all of my systems" includes my Amiga 2000/AmigaOS 3.9.). I still think that the usual HP Laserjet bunch should work more or less fuss free.

I must admit I mostly print text documents - so I'm not talking abount stuff like high end photo printing...

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@StantheAmigaMan

The 8610 appears to support PCL3 printer language and the IPP protocol, so the photosmart driver may well work for you.

Did you try it?

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@outrun

Neither of those laser jests support a "printer language" they are both "host based" so sorry to say you are probably out of luck when it comes to priting direct from your amigaos4 machine.

Last edited by broadblues on 20-Nov-2015 at 12:40 PM.
Last edited by broadblues on 20-Nov-2015 at 12:39 PM.

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@StantheAmigaMan

Quote:

Namely, the day after I bought this PPC board I replced my Brother MFC 435W with an HP OfficeJet Pro 8610. It's wired, and wireless. Printer address is xx.xx.1.4, and I can access this page from the Amiga with no problem.

I've got an HP LaserJet 1230n (wired/USB).
I can access the web page of the printer aswell, unfortunately that doesn't mean you can print anything...yet

Unfortunately your printer doesn't understand PostScript, only PCL3/PCL3e, which makes it a little harder.

Quote:

What I CAN'T do is print from the Amig, either wired with USB or over the network. Aside from the usbprinter.device, do I need anything special, like the hp-photosmart driver?

If you have the space/possibility/cable length i'd suggest to always use USB.
While wired/wireless is an option, it's not, let's say "perfect", software-wise in AmigaOS4.

NOTE:
If i plug an USB cable in my printer and try to use the usbprinter.device i get an error message as soon as i choose the device in Printer prefs:

Notification:
USB Printer

Printer protocol 1284.4 is unsupported

Workbench:
USB Printer

The driver failed to access the device
Do you want to retry?

Printer

Can't open printer port.device "usbprinter.device" unit 0.


I also tried the usbdot4.device.
While it doesn't come up with an error message it also never finishes a print job.
It seems it keeps sending stuff in an endless loop to the printer (which is receiving - the blinking LED on the printer tells me that), but after 45 mins of waiting i gave up.
(Of course, it's also possible that the printer tries to communicate, but due to the unsupported USB protocol, a handshake is never given.)


So, i'm out of luck USB-wise and can't help you in-depth with that setup, but it should be as easy.
If you want to try it with USB first, just skip steps 1-3

Lets move on to the wired way.


You need a few things first, namely
1) NetPrinter.device
Yes, i know it's 68k, but that doesn't matter, it works

2) Install and configure NetPrinter.
You only need the Prefs program and the netprinter.device.

The .device goes into DEVS:, the Prefs anywhere you want.

3) Open up the Prefs
Leave "unit" at "0"
Set your "hostname" - the address with .1.4 at the end
Protocol: Direct
Options: Port: 9100
Save

4) A fitting printer driver.
The HP Photosmart is a PCL3 printer driver and should fit just fine.
You can try other drivers, but as they are pretty old you might not find one that really works good enough with your printer.

5) Open Printer Prefs
Choose your newly installed printer driver: HP_Photosmart
Check "Always init printer"
Port device: netprinter.device ("usbprinter.device for USB)
Leave the rest at default...you can play with the settings later.

Now print something, preferrably a pdf file from AmiPDF using the "Workbench Printer" setting...it showed that this is my version of a printer(device)stress test.
If AmiPDF prints without stumbling or falling over your printer is safe.

NOTE:
While my printer supports PCL5e/PCL6 i got a netprinter.device crash on trying to print with AmiPDF, means that the driver is doing something the printer doesn't understand, hence sending an error message back which lets netprinter.device ALWAYS cough up and crash.
So, if you're getting crashes from either netprinter.device or GS (AmiPDF) it's probably because your printer doesn't understand your driver.

That's why i would prefer (if possible) USB, because USB might not crash at once.


Just this morning i was able to finally install a working setup for my printer.
No more crashes in netprinter.device - even with multiple pages.

I used WB's PostScript driver, netprinter.device in above mentioned setting, set the resolution in PrinterPrefs to 300x300 dpi (only because a bigger setting will take AmiPDF 5+ minutes to prepare a single test site and another 2.5 mins to send it to my printer and because there is no difference in text print i could see when using 600 dpi).

Right now i'm a happy camper, not sure how long this will last though, but 15 pages printed through AmiPDF in a row (5 double or triple sided) doesn't sound that bad, does it?

Good luck with your printer

Last edited by Raziel on 27-Apr-2017 at 06:37 AM.

@general comment.

I just bought a hp Laserjet Pro 200 Color M251n for about £90 via ebay.

I can print va usb or ethernet (or email in principle but I haven't set that up) using the PostScript driver.

I'm finding the easiest way to print at quality is to ftp the postscrit output of wordworth to it directly, this is much fasfetr than using the PRT: device is passthrough mode.

It also does PDF direct.

Printer settings can be easily setup through the web interface, once the ip had been setup through the LCD GUI on the machine. (Iwent for a manul static ip setup, anyone whose configured an amigaos net setup should cope with the setup process easily).

In advance of buying this I spent quite a while reading the specs, mainly the language support, on a number of printers.

Look for ones that support Postscript or PCL3 preferebley postscript, reject any that require "host based" printing, those are never going to work on amigaos.

The only downside og this new printer is it's size, it's 4 times the size of my old hp815C (which gave me 15 years of service, but fimally wore out last month!)

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@Raziel

Quote:

Printer protocol 1284.4 is unsupported

This means it's a Dot4 device, so you'll need to use usbdot4.device (although I never had much luck with it myself)

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@Raziel

If you printer uses Postscript and you have postscript to print set the driver inot passthrough mode.

If it doesn't do PDF direct then you can convert a doc faster with ghostscript than AmiPDF

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@Chris_Y

Quote:

Chris_Y wrote: @Raziel Quote: Printer protocol 1284.4 is unsupported This means it's a Dot4 device, so you'll need to use usbdot4.device (although I never had much luck with it myself)

As i wrote in my first post the dot4 device went into an endless loop when sending the data to the printer

@broadblues

Quote:

broadblues wrote: @Raziel If you printer uses Postscript and you have postscript to print set the driver inot passthrough mode.

I cannot set anything in the PostScript driver but Print spacing, Density/Resolution and Print quality...everything else is greyed out.

EDIT:
I also cannot set anything in the printer itself.
The sole options for PS are:
Print PS Errors: (Yes/No)
PS Wait Timeout: 100 seconds (0 - 4095)

Quote:

If it doesn't do PDF direct then you can convert a doc faster with ghostscript than AmiPDF

That's the thing, i don't want to use a second or third program just to be able to print (not even with an automated click on some script).
I want to open a document, text or pricure, click on print and off it goes, everything else should be handled by the device/driver imho

Last edited by Raziel on 20-Nov-2015 at 01:33 PM.

@Raziel

Quote:

It seems it keeps sending stuff in an endless loop to the printer (which is receiving - the blinking LED on the printer tells me that), but after 45 mins of waiting i gave up. (Of course, it's also possible that the printer tries to communicate, but due to the unsupported USB protocol, a handshake is never given.)

But does it actually do all the printing?

If so then just ignore the blinking light, that always happens with hp printers drivers on amaigaos

Certainly it always did with my hp815C, the turboprint drier didn't have that issue, but they had access to NDA documentation IIRC.

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@broadblues

Quote:

Quote: It seems it keeps sending stuff in an endless loop to the printer (which is receiving - the blinking LED on the printer tells me that), but after 45 mins of waiting i gave up. (Of course, it's also possible that the printer tries to communicate, but due to the unsupported USB protocol, a handshake is never given.) But does it actually do all the printing? If so then just ignore the blinking light, that always happens with hp printers drivers on amaigaos Certainly it always did with my hp815C, the turboprint drier didn't have that issue, but they had access to NDA documentation IIRC.

Nope, as i wrote above i was waiting for 45 Minutes and then gave up, rebooted and tried another driver.
That was with a Text PDF file and the network sending was long finished (checked with netdock.docky)

@Raziel

Quote:

I cannot set anything in the PostScript driver but Print spacing, Density/Resolution and Print quality...everything else is greyed out.

The postscript printer has a dedicated prefs program, (called PrinterPS) to allow more precise control than the main interface allows (the tooltip help even tells you that when you hover over the driver otions button)

In that you will see the possibilty to switch between Postscript and pasthrough an a whole heap of other options.

Quote:

That's the thing, i don't want to use a second or third program just to be able to print (not even with an automated click on some script). I want to open a document, text or pricure, click on print and off it goes, everything else should be handled by the device/driver imho

Best not use AmiPDF at all then as it does exactly that, you can just speed things up and possibly improve quailty, by not converting to gfx then back to postscript, by using pass through mode on the driver, and converting first with ghostscript.

You could possibly print to postcript from AmiPDF direct too if using passthrough mode.

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@Raziel

Quote:

Nope, as i wrote above i was waiting for 45 Minutes and then gave up, rebooted and tried another driver. That was with a Text PDF file and the network sending was long finished (checked with netdock.docky)

Sounds more like a missing EOF signal of some kind then, I saw that when printing from wordworth via PRT: with postscript in Passthrough mode, printing to file then copying to PRT: worked.

Might still be a different issue ofcourse.

But if the network works for you then not much point worrying, probably faster anyway.

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@broadblues

Oh boy, i'm on AmigaOS since 1.2 but i never used the PrinterPS prefs...it totally escaped me... :-/

Great, now i have something new to play with, thanks for the hint

edit: It doesn't change anything regarding the print-out, it still is positioned too far to the left.
Doesn't really matter what i set in PrinterPS...probably still the printer firmware itself which interprets the data sent in a slightly wrong way.

But all in all i can live with what i have now, at least no netprinter.device/GS crash anymore

Last edited by Raziel on 20-Nov-2015 at 03:05 PM.

@broadblues/@StanTheAmigaMan

Quote:

The 8610 appears to support PCL3 printer language and the IPP protocol, so the photosmart driver may well work for you.

And for IPP there's my ipp.device

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@broadblues

Not long ago I got the exact same printer as yours.
I have not had a printer connected to my Amiga since...
Well, it was in the classic days for sure. So it's been a while.

As you mentioned, it's the size of a small apartment, but I am very happy with it's performance from AmigaOS. I run wireless mode, even though it's sitting five feet from a network switch with open ports.

So far, I have used my lack of an available printer as a good excuse to avoid printing from Score. I guess that excuse doesn't work any more.

:)

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@Raziel

After setting the printer in Preferences, I decided to try printing this webpage. I got back about 200 pages of code. :D Perfect for scrap papert

Trying the netprinter.devcice next. If I can FIND it..

Last edited by StantheAmigaMan on 21-Nov-2015 at 01:29 AM.

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@StantheAmigaMan

Quote:

Trying the netprinter.devcice next. If I can FIND it..

Err, read my post again, skip to number 1)