17 Mar
2008
17 Mar
'08
9:14 p.m.
On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 09:28:39PM +0100, Philipp Hachtmann wrote:
Hi folks,
I have two Omnibus printer interfaces, not from DEC. They could be
something german...
They are labeled "CSI printer interface" and have 20 pin Berg connector.
It seems to be a 7 bit interface.
Does anybody know anything or has any ideas? Docs?
No specific ideas, but there should be IOT selection jumpers
that may tell you if the card is responding to LP8E instructions
or not. I'd look the defaults up, but I don't have satellite right
now, and I haven't memorized those IOTs.
If you look up the LP8E and check out the IOTs, you could try
writing a small program and issuing the one to send a byte to
the printer and check the activity on the Berg connector. A
parallel printer is going to typically have data bits and handshaking.
Most OMNIBUS cards are pretty sparse - it might not be too difficult
to reverse-engineer it, especially if you start by looking at the
bus interface and IOT section of a real LP8E - any driver-compatible
clone is likely to be quite similar at that stage.
If the card isn't using LP8E IOTs, it could be doing anything,
though, which isn't impossible to figure out, but it adds a bit
of complexity to the task of figuring it out.
Perhaps the card is a clone of a DEC standard card. So
it would be
interesting to get information about the term "CSI printer"....
I don't recognize that term.
P.S.: I could also need a DEC parallel printer card
(Centronics or Data
Products compatible) as well...
Yuo didn't say what kind of -8, but if you have an -8/a with the
standard I/O cards installed, you can use the general purpose parallel
I/O on the DKC8AA as a parallel printer interface. There is supposed
to be a driver for OS/8 that knows about that ports IOTs and which
does the data bit inversion in software (since the DKC8AA is not set
up identically to the LP8E). I haven't tried to do it, but I've read
about it, and it sounds straightforward.
If you have an older OMNIBUS machine, you won't have room for a hex-height
card, so you would need an LP8E or perhaps an LQP8E or similar. My -8/a
has an LP8E running to an LA180 (when they are in the same room), mostly
because I bought the LP8E back in the 1980s before I heard that you could
use the DKC8AA, or else I probably would have spent the money on a different
interface.
-ethan
--
Ethan Dicks, A-333-S Current South Pole Weather at 17-Mar-2008 at 21:00 Z
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Ethan.Dicks at usap.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html