Colour possible or not?

[PaulY]

I will be installing my retro printer soon, and thinking about it, realise my memory has faded with regards to the development of printers during the 1980s to 90s.

I am a ZX Spectrum fan and I have bought my Retro Printer primarily to use with my ZX Spectrum with a MultiPrint centronics and-on interface. I also have two different floppy disk interfaces for my other ZX Spectrums which have centronics connections. For these I intend to use the Retro Printer's Epson 9 pin emulation option. I expect this option will be best for my Atari STe too.

However, I also have a dual boot Windows 95 & 98 laptop, as well as a dual boot Windows 95 and Windows 2000 Pentium 2 desktop, both with centronic printer connections. I was using the Windows machines with a Epson Stylus Color 880 printer which supports ESC/P2 control codes, until it sadly deceased. So I may now also use the Retro Printer with Epson 24 pin emulation for these machines. This leaves me pondering the following.

1- I believe I will able to print B&W/grey shade, but not colour, on the Spectrum.
2- Will the above be true for the Atari STe too?
3- The Stylus Color 880 is an color inkjet and it printed in colour from my Windows machines using the standard Epson driver for it. Will I be able to print in colour using the retro printer using the Epson 24 pin emulation?
4- Whether yes or no, to the above which would be the best Epson Windows driver to install?

One thing hazing my thoughts is trying to recall 100% whether dot matrix printers were always limited to B&W/Grey by the limitations of their design, so colour was only possible when inkjets came into being? (Excluding laser office machines)

The modern printer I will be connecting to is a HP Envy 5546 (colour inkjet)

Thanks for your advice.

Paul

[RWAP]

The advent of colour in printers is an oddity.

Some early printers (daisywheel and dot matrix) did support at least red ink if you had a multicoloured ink ribbon - the ribbon was lifted up to give you black or red as the printhead hit it.

So far as I know, only inkjets supported multi colours, using a mix of cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK). Later inkjets even support a mix of 6 colours!

From the retro-printer's point of view, if the computer sends teh correct Epson control codes used to select a colour, then we use colour on the printout, so it is all dependent on the printer interface and software you are running on the original computer.

The Spectrum had several printer interfaces - I don't know if any of them supported colour - I doubt any of them suppported the later ESC/P2 Epson control codes. I assume the Atari is similar (I have never owned an Atari), but that may have just about touched the era of ESC/P2.

From the Retro-Printer point of view, the main difference between the ESC/P standard and ESC/P2 standard is in how line spacing was calculated (one used 1/60 of an inch, the other 1/72 of an inch as the default unit), which results in older ESC/P output using more space when you use the 24 pin mode.

As for which Windows driver is best - it doesn't really matter as there is no real difference between the various ESC/P2 models but why not use an ESC/P driver and then you can keep everything in the 9 pin mode.

[PaulY]

As my ZX Spectrum and Atari STe are Epson 9 Pin era I have set my Retro Printer Driver to 9 Pin. I do also have a Pentium II dual boot Win95/2000 PC. The latter can of course could use am Epson 25 Pin driver, but to save me having to edit the driver whenever I wanted to use the Pentium I have been experimenting to see what 9 pin Windows 95/2000 compatible Epson driver gives the best output on this machine. As mentioned in this thread the Epson JX80 works in COLOUR. Whilst text is perfect graphics look like they were printed with narrow white line spaces between each inside the graphic image. In a way its very authentic in that it reminds me of the output dot matrix printers with a fading ribbon looked like (as far as I can recall) I wonder if there is any better 9 Pin driver I could try of a setting I could change to reduce the white line graphic gaps? If not then maybe an alternatively route would be to have a separate SD Card set up for a 24 Pin printer that I could plug in when I wanted to use the Pentium? This would save me having to edited the Retro Printer driver settings each time. All ideas appreciated. The attached file is vastly reduced in size from the original retro printer created file, so I can upload it, but I think it helps show what I mean by white line spaces.

[RWAP]

Are you sure you have /root/config/epson_pins set to 9?

The banding is normally caused by the opposite - ie it is set to 24 and the driver expects a 9 pin printer.