On Mon, 25 Sep 2006, John R. wrote:
On 9/25/06, aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk
<aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
Thanks for that, if no-one can help I'll
look
out for that piece of kit on eBay and get
myself a laptop (I hate MS & Windoze)
I did some research before buying myself the
Labelwriter, and some guy (I forget his name)
has written a driver for a modern printer
so he could use it with his retro one.
He used software to intercept the data being
sent/recieved, rather than some equipment.
I also hooked up the Labelwriter to my Amiga
600, and used AMOS BASIC to try and get it
to print something by sending random data
(perhaps a bad idea) to it with no luck.
I did, however, confirm that the Amiga
recognised that the printer was connected.
There are software serial protocol analyzers that just monitor the
port. They are inferior to hardware protocol analyzers in that they
may hide or distort relative timing of requests/responses and flow
control signals. But they are certainly better than nothing, and may
be sufficient.
Yep, I wrote one a while ago to reverse-engineer a smartcard reader.
Unfortunately the reader died before I could use my tool :-( I called the
software serialdump, you can get it here:
http://alexeyt.freeshell.org/code/serialdump.tgz
The readme has instructions for making cabling:
http://alexeyt.freeshell.org/code/serialdump.README
Let me know if you need help with it.
Alexey