Printer support

[ivop]

Hi,

Currently, CP/M-65 has no idea about LST:, CON:, PRN:, etc.. Over at the osiweb forum they were asking about how to redirect I/O to a serial port or a printer. I think on the original CP/M it's, for example, PIP that has the notion of what LST: actually means and calls the appropriate BIOS call to output characters to either LST:. At least that's what I think the PIP PL/M source code does, so perhaps we could teach our COPY to write to a serial or printer device, too? Or port PIP? How about IOBYTE redirection? Do you see a way for CP/M-65 to support something similar, like STAT CON:=UC1:? I see that the PL/M source code also sometimes overwrites IOBYTE, calls CONOUT, PUNCH or LIST, and then restores it back to the old value.

Regards,
Ivo

[ivop]

I did some investigation, and the OSI C1P (600 series) uses its ACIA for three functions with a rotary switch. Cassette, modem, and serial printer. So just adding a serial device driver to CP/M-65 and teach copy how to copy a file verbatim to the serial device should do the trick of printing.

But printing in general would need a new device type "printer", as on most platforms printers are not serial devices.