OLD Serial Printers: Any hope?

[BJF]

I found in my stock of Way Back Bits a couple of dot matrix printers and with the price of ink being what it is, wondered if either might be pressed into service for Draft printing.
Advice is sought on how to connect them to computers possibly without a serial port, how to get them discovered by CUPS, and if drivers to talk to them with exist.

They are: Star NX1000, and Epson FX850.

I will accept being told not to be so b***** silly!

Thanks.

[Just17]

There are a few threads/posts about dot matrix printers .....  parallel I think .....  but I do not recall any of them having success. I suppose you have read all those .....  they come up from a search for   dot matrix  on the forum.

Good luck with the 'project', I hope you succeed .......  although I honestly doubt it will be possible. So, up to you to prove me wrong .....  I look forward to it 

[AS]

I found in my stock of Way Back Bits a couple of dot matrix printers and with the price of ink being what it is, wondered if either might be pressed into service for Draft printing.
Advice is sought on how to connect them to computers possibly without a serial port, how to get them discovered by CUPS, and if drivers to talk to them with exist.

They are: Star NX1000, and Epson FX850.

I will accept being told not to be so b***** silly!

Thanks.

The Epson FX850 will work, (at least I have used it thru the parallel port), if using USB to parallel convertor, this is required to be bi-directional, (some are unidirectional), serial RS-232 should work either, but I have not tested it recently.

About the Star NX1000, don't know, but IIRC should work either, nearly all matrix printers support IBM emulation or Epson ESC/P emulation.

May be the printers will not be automatically recognized, but you can force a manual setup.

Alternatively you may try to find some Ethernet to serial printer server, like this one:
http://accessories.euro.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?c=uk&l=en&s=dfo&sku=a2548980

AS

[horusfalcon]

I used to own an NX-1000, and it took a beating and kept coming back for more.  I gave it away with an old computer (a CP/M machine).  One question:  where are you getting ribbons for that thing?  (Or are you re-inking?)

as has set you on the right track - the NX will emulate a Proprinter II nicely, and all that remains is getting the interface bits figured out.  USB-to-serial (or parallel if it's like the one I had) can be tricky.  Black Box makes some nice interfacing widgets that work well, but are expensive.  I remember they had a parallel over Ethernet printer server in a dongle that was the bomb.

Hope you get those printers going all right.  Dot-matrix is noisy and kinda slow, but, yeah, it's reliable and cheap.  (And it would be cool in a retro sort of way...)

Later On,
D