A Virtual Parallel Printer for a Vintage Computer

One of the neat things about using vin­tage com­put­ing equip­ment is fig­ur­ing out mod­ern ways to work with the older technology.

Why virtual printing?

Recently, I wanted to explore prin­ted out­put from my NEC PC-8201a. For one thing, work­ing ‘on the hard­ware’ in this case has a dis­play lim­it of eight lines of forty char­ac­ters — a bit of a pain when you’re used to work­ing with full scrolling screens of text on a mod­ern com­puter. A vir­tu­al print­er would let me dump a doc­u­ment or list­ing to the print­er and see the whole thing.

Yes, not exactly an ‘authen­t­ic’ vin­tage exper­i­ence, but one I’m will­ing to sac­ri­fice if I end up using the vin­tage device a bit more 🙂

Wherefore art thou, virtual printer?

Vin­tage hard­ware and mod­ern hard­ware don’t always play eas­ily togeth­er. Mod­ern print­ers usu­ally con­nect to com­puters by a man­aged USB port or via net­work con­nec­tion. Neither option exis­ted forty years ago so anoth­er solu­tion was needed.

After a bit of search­ing and read­ing the /r/retrobattlestations subred­dit I came upon the NEWPRINT/Multi Vir­tu­al Print­er Inter­face, ostens­ibly for the TRS80 Mod­el 1/3/4/4p, Apple IIe (w/Grappler+),and oth­er* vin­tage com­puters. The NEC PC-8201a falls into the ‘oth­er’ category.

To quote the website:

NEWPRINT/Multi is a wifi-enabled “vir­tu­al” print­er adapter for TRS-80 (Mod­el 1, 3, 4/4P) and Apple IIe (with Grap­pler+ print­er card). *Oth­er vin­tage com­puters may work with NEWPRINT but only TRS-80 and Apple IIe have been tested at the moment. NEWPRINT con­nects to your com­puter­’s print­er port and your loc­al wifi net­work to send print­er out­put to any device that sup­ports a mod­ern browser (iPad, Desktop PC, Mac, etc.).

That looked like it would do the trick. The NEC PC-8201 uses a stand­ard par­al­lel print­er pro­tocol, so inter­fa­cing should be pretty straight forward.

Giv­en the sim­il­ar­ity of the NEC units and it’s m100 brethren (Tandy Mod­el 100, 102, 200, Oliv­etti M10, Kyo­cera K‑85), I’d expect the NEWPRINT/Multi to work with them as well.

I ordered a unit, and a par­al­lel cable as I also have an Apple //e that will even­tu­ally need to talk to the vir­tu­al printer.

As well, you’ll need a power sup­ply (none included in the pack­age) but any +5 Volt DC Micro-usb power sup­ply (ie. cell phone char­ger) or stand­ard 5.5mm bar­rel jack power sup­ply will do. There are also power pins on the PCB if you chose to wire power in directly.

After ten days and one border/customs cross­ing, it arrived. Now to hook it up.

Connecting the connector

The NEWPRINT/Multi is a nice PCB that snaps into the included 3d-prin­ted base. A clean approach.

The cable uses stand­ard a stand­ard 34 pin con­nect­or com­mon to many micro­com­puters of the time. And the more astute m100 read­er would notice this red flag here. I didn’t.

I should have remembered that the NEC PC-8201a uses a stand­ard 26 pin con­nect­or. While the rib­bon cable I ordered would work fine for my Apple //e, it won’t for the NEC.

A brief con­ver­sa­tion with Kyle, the NEWPRINT/Multi design­er, ensued. He was able to cla­ri­fy which sig­nals wer­en’t that import­ant as the NEC PC-8201a man­aged to com­mu­nic­ate to print­ers-of-the-day just fine using few­er pins.

For­tu­nately I had some female-female jump­er cables used in pre­vi­ous Ardu­ino pro­jects, and the print­er con­nec­tion was made. I’ve since ordered prop­er con­nect­ors and rib­bon cable and will build a more per­man­ent cable soon.

Setup

After over­com­ing the minor hard­ware conun­drum, the next step was to get it set up and con­nec­ted to my WiFi network.

The NEWPRINT/Multi web­site con­tains a link to the PDF doc­u­ment­a­tion. The setup por­tion was clear and con­cise, and my setup worked on the first attempt.

Basic­ally, you put the NEWPRINT/Multi into ‘com­mand’ mode, power up your com­puter, jump into BASIC, and type some ‘LPRINT’ com­mands which speak dir­ectly to the NEWPRINT/Multi and con­fig­ure it to your WiFi network.

Once that’s done, reboot the NEWPRINT/Multi and the vir­tu­al print­er will be up and running.

Where’s my virtual printer?

Ok, we’ve got the vin­tage com­puter talk­ing to the to the vir­tu­al print­er using the par­al­lel print­er port. Stuff’s going to the vir­tu­al print­er, but where can I see it?

The NEWPRINT/Multi is a cool little board. Once you’ve com­pleted the net­work setup, and rebooted it, it set up a web serv­er at ws://newprint.local. So all you have to do is point any web browser on your loc­al net­work to ws://newprint.local and you’ll see the vir­tu­al print­er interface.

Now any print com­mands from the vin­tage com­puter will be received and pro­cessed by the vir­tu­al print­er and dis­played on your web browser in that very slick interface.

What’s next?

Well, in my case, a bit more BASIC cod­ing with easi­er debug­ging by view­ing full prin­touts, and maybe updat­ing / design­ing pro­grams to out­put to the lar­ger print­er dis­play. A poor-mans Video Dis­play Inter­face for the m100 🙂

I may also try and extend the vir­tu­al print­er verisimil­it­ude by mount­ing the NEWPRINT/Multi into a 3d-prin­ted peri­od-emu­lat­ing print­er case. Kyle shared a design he pos­ted to Thingi­verse and I may modi­fy that to include a slot for an older tab­let so that the ‘print­er’ will have ‘vir­tu­al paper’ 🙂

Oh, and in my email exchange with Kyle, he did hint that Print­shop graph­ic sup­port for the Apple II is com­ing soon, though would require a firm­ware update of the NEWPRINT/Multi device. Reas­on­ably straight­for­ward, it seems accord­ing to the documentation.

Per­haps that will get me motiv­ated to start clean­ing and restor­ing the old fam­ily Apple //e. Fod­der for a future post.