Conecting new printer to a 286

[Capturing the printer output data from a classic machine on a modern PC] Quite likely, although the former tends to be a lot more expensive and harder to find than the latter... However, the former (parallel-serial) is also the easy part to build. As I said in an earlier message, you can do it with a few TTL chips [1], a dumb UART and a bit of logic, or a microcontroller, depending on your likes and dislikes. [1] I built one _many_ years ago to use an ASR33 as a (slow) punch on a device that was expecting to drive a Facti 4070. I used a few TTL chips. I didn't have any shift registers in the junk box, so I used a multiplexer and counter. Basically, the counter was normally held reset. The paralell output strobe set a flip-floip whicl allowed the counter to run. This contorlled the mux, which selelected a hard-wired start bit, then the 8 data bits in turn, then a couple of hardwired stop bits. And then a bit of logic cleared the FF, dorcing the conunter to be reset. And of course the output of the FF was also the busy signal back to the host. As I said , a a few TTL chips... It's a pity the Ferret doesn't have a parallel input facility. For those who've not seen this strange piece of computer history, it's a portable (built in an attache' case) device that combines an RS232 breakout box, RS232 interface, parallel output interface (Centroncis or Dataproducts IIRC), current loop interface, strip printer, casette interface, EPROM programmer (!) and Z80 computer. It will do serial (either RS232 or current loop) to parallel conversions as standard, it will also do RS232 <-> current loop with differnet baud rates on the 2 sides. -tony