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 is also how the NeXT printer works. It's an SX engine. It's
surprisingly fast at rendering complex pages.
There's also something called a SPARCprinter which is a similar device
for use on (surprise surprise!) SPARCs. (The interface, at least in
the cases I've seen, is an Sbus card - the SUNW,lpvi.) I got mine
working under NetBSD ages ago, but haven't done anything of
significance with it since.
It has the interesting feature that it can run at either 300 or 400
dpi, selectable by the host, and that it can use smaller-than-full-page
page bitmaps, supports seven different paper sizes, and can separately
invert the page bitmap or the fill around the page bitmap.
Unfortunately, the inverting bits don't actually change it between
write-white and write-black. :)
Of course, you need nearly twice as much memory for a page bitmap at
400 as you do for the same paper area at 300, though neither is all
that much for a fully loaded higher-end SPARCstation, which, my
impression is, tends to be the sort most people who still run
SPARCstations have.
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