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Retro-Printer Setup
There was a brief period of time when it was fashionable to have an office party or a home-celebration (birthday, graduation, etc.) that involved taping up a long-printed banner. These days we are printing far less, but it was a long road to standardizing how we stream images-as-data across a worldwide network. There was a time that we could ignore print margins and seamlessly print from one page to the next (being “line-feed” paper that was attached end to end, a style as far back as the 1950s and original IBM printers), resulting in being able to create celebration-banners.
The Retro-Printer is a RPi3 (Raspberry Pi 3) device with software to emulate common Epson or HP printers (available here and PDF manual is here), with work (updates) going on to support other brand printers as well (like older Apple printers). There are ways to connect the RetroPrinter wirelessly, but since I’ve wired up all rooms to have RJ45, I just use that. Otherwise, the device will have to be used near your router.
NOTE (on image above): Mouse is not necessary, there is no boot-up GUI for any of this. The kbd and HDMI is optional and only necessary if you want to physically log into the system (default root/rootroot) and configure settings. But once you have the RJ45 connection, any maintenance you can then do over Bitvise SSH/SFTP. The switch at the center of the module is not a power switch, but is an “Online/Offline” switch like printers had back in the day. I think the utility there is, if you were sharing the printer port with another device, you could take the printer offline and not have to completely unplug it.
Working with Rich Mellor himself, we debugged some issues related to emulating an Epson EX-1000 printer used with the famous Print Shop Deluxe (specifically the 1992 version here). Once wired over ethernet, the Retro-Printer can host printed files via samba (accessible from Windows) or Bitvise SSH (and/or SFTP) to get the output of legacy print-enabled software.
I’m still learning more about the Retro-Printer and will expand upon all this over time! The main things to know are:
- /root/config/ is the path to the config files. Use nano to edit this on-system. The settings are spread across many files. In general, you edit them as needed and don’t need to restart the retro-printer hardware.
- For me I set output_printer = No (I don’t want to relay the output to a physical printer)
- output_PDF to Yes
- I had to set epson_pins to 9.
- flush_timeout = 10
- (handshaking left at 0) (signal_time left at 5)
- offline_switch = Job_Control (switch Retro-Printer to “0” offline when print job is done; for Print Shop Deluxe EX-1000 color it was about 3 minutes per page that I had to wait!)
- timeout = 3600 (1 hour – combined with above setting, it just means to switch the offline/online to offline at end of print job to initiate the conversions to PNG/PDF; the print can take up to this timeout value, don’t have to wait the full hour)
- page_size = F-12 (this didn’t seem to make much difference to me compared to A4)
- The default output_path is set to /home/pi/data/ (but again this folder content is shared from samba, so just do \\Retro-Printer which is the default hostname (or check your router and see what IP address are assigned to this device)
After changing parameters, you can power-cycle the Retro-Printe,r or type reboot, or try the following:
- cd /home/pi/temp/sdl/escparser
- ./retroprinter-restart.sh
BELOW: Sample sequence of using Print Shop Deluxe. The rendering of banners is quite slow, even on a 386DX-20. But it is doing an appreciable amount of work, maintaining a large graphic state in memory (of custom font rendering and overlay graphics).
BELOW: Retro-Printer hosts a “printout” folder, to access the print results in various formats (native EPS, PNG, PDF). The two files here are the default Print Sample.
BELOW: Here is a sample result of the printer banner. Modern day printers are focused on single page prints, so the Retro-Printer does its best to translate that from linefeed attached pages. Also, as was shown above, I was able to select Epson EX-1000 (Color) and did get color output into the PDFs!
