Generic printer driver?

[simonsunnyboy]

My Brother MFC L8690CDW happily prints data from older Laserjet drivers on the Atari, I just need to transfer the data to the printer.
So is there a generic printer driver for the CosmosEX?

E.q. emulate Atari side BIOS and GEMDOS interfaces and pipe incoming printer data into a configurable CUPS queue, preferably on the network?

If not what would be necessary to provide this?

[AdamK]

There already is thing like https://www.retroprinter.com/buy-the-retro-printer/ But a emulated SLM could be great

[stormy]

As Simon said, piping to a CUPS queue would be great. Many Ataris are networked these days due to recent new hardware advances. @Wongck's phprint was good until the Google print system was turned off.

[Rustynutt]

You guys are talking way over my head
Been saving documents out printing to an IMG file via NVDI and Pagestream, moving them to a PC, converting to PDF with Ifranview to print on a Brother Laser.
But that's not what you ask.
Have a couple of Parallel port to Ethernet devices that do automatic conversion.
Haven't tested them yet. Anyone else?

[simonsunnyboy]

Have a couple of Parallel port to Ethernet devices that do automatic conversion.

No additional device if the CosmosEx can do the job. Hence my question...

[Rustynutt]

Had to go to Jokie's site to even know what one is. Behind the times a bit

[wongck]

As Simon said, piping to a CUPS queue would be great. Many Ataris are networked these days due to recent new hardware advances. @Wongck's phprint was good until the Google print system was turned off.

It is unfortunate that Google pulled Google print. It allowed printing of popular formats WITHOUT needing of printer drivers as google servers translate what it received to something that the attached printer understood.

However if your printers says it support MS Windows Server 2019, then PHerp will be able to work with your printer over network.
PHerp supports both printer protocol LPD/LPR and Port9100 - which are that standard printer communication protocol used by MS Windows Servers (since the beginning, up to and including the latest version). This is the method the computer transfer the data to the printer... the analogy for human is the telephone, a chat tool, email or snail mail. This is not the printer driver.

Note that this is different from the printer control language ( PCL ) which states the language to be used to tell the printer what to do... the analogy here is human giving commands speaking in English, German, Norwegian, Swedish etc. The other party must know the language you are using for proper communication. This is done by NVDI... say it can do up to PCL3-ish. This part is called the printer driver... as it allows the computer to drive the printer via the correct language. Other stuff the printer driver does may be printing double side, colour etc... i.e. the commands that controls the printers.

If your printer states it support PDF, it means that it understands the PDF language ( use a text editor to open an uncompressed PDF and you can see the commands to render the page) and you can transfer the PDF to the printer using either LPD/LPR or Port9100 to get it printed out.

So if you use PHERP and NVDI .... you can effectively transfer your print job to the printer on the netwrok and get it printed.
If you use the lpherp device as output for NVDI, it will pipe NVDI print job directly to PHerp and get the print job printed out to the printer.
( this is just like printing to a network printer on Windows, you don't have to do anything other than pressing Print on the application).

The limiting factor here is actually NVDI as it cannot do anything above PCL3, most modern printers now do PCL6.
Even for ESC/P, NVDI does the older version and does not support colour nor the Epson inkjet printer well.

I hope this clarify .... what does PHERP do.... and why you still need a printer driver.

Sorry for the long post.

[1st1]

With the CosmosEx the emulation of the SLM printer should not be diffcult to implement. The SLM is very stupid, it only prints b/w bitmap which comes ready rendered over the ACSI interface. It only must be converted to something CUPS can handle. The only challenge might be SLM paper format detection between A4 and Letter.

When using Diabolo-, Laserbrain (EpsonFX emulator) driver or GDOS on the ATARI side, any piece of sofftware on the Atari side should be able to print with that, except of Falcon which has no ACSI. (It does not make sense to provide SLM emulation on SCSI mode of Cosmos-Ex as no SLM driver will search for the printer on SCSI, but maybe even that could be patched?)

[simonsunnyboy]

SLM printer is entirely optional for my usage.

All I ask for is generic transfer of printer output data via BIOS/GEMDOS calls into a CUPS queue configurable within CosmosEX.
No filtering, printer driver selected by the Atari side program as if it was printing via the parallel port.

[ftovar]

My SLM 804 is no longer working because like an idiot I left it out in a shed instead of in my house. BEST Electronics will not sell me any of his NOS because it is beyond the engineering lifecycle and B&C has to go through his warehouse to locate his SLM 605 stock that I want to buy. So...I have a Brother MFC7840 laser printer which does HP Laser Jet Emulation. Can a USB B extension to a USB female be used with a USB A to 25 pin parallel printer cable on the ST and has anyone successfully done this? I am not going to be using any NETUSBee as I need the Cartridge port for the CLAB Unitor N or Cubase cartrridge Key. Only upgrade I have is ATSpeed 286, HD 1.44 Floppy disk and 4 megs of ram way back around 1991 or so. Sorry for the long winded message. I want to be able to print with Cubase Score 2.0 or Notator SL 3.2 as I know they use HP Laser Jet 3 drivers and below. Thank you