There was a
laserprinter available for i think the Atari ST (or later
model) that did away with the processor and and used the atari. This
cut the cost of the printer down to about 1000 pounds/dollars which was
very cheap in its time, esp when compared to the apple laser.. I think
it was a canon engine.
This is also how the NeXT printer works. It's an SX engine. It's
surprisingly fast at rendering complex pages.
AS I mentioend ewarlier, there was a VDO interface board abailable for
the SX printer. The orinial/official one fitted in place of the
formatter, it was just a simple set of buffers. The SX DC controller
board has single-ended 'beam detect' and 'video' signals whic hare not
really suitable tfor sending down the cable to/from the host.
I am told the serial[1] control.status interface on the SX is upwards
compatible with that on the CX, the former accepts a few more comamnds.
I've never managed to get a list of the commands/status messages that are
used on this interface, fortunately you can ignore it if you just want ot
pritn from the nornmal paper tray, etc.
[1] This is a synchronous interfce with a separae clock signal. It's not
evenclose to RS232 .
-tony