[snip] Years ago, I used to have a Diablo Hytype-I that was interfaced to my CP/M system via a GPIO card. I originally wrote the print program in assembly, but re-wrote it in C (my first C program! Using the Aztec C compiler, IIRC). It wound up being 3 times faster, since it was easier to overlap the platen, carriage and print wheel motion. That ol' thing would hammer along, printing out proportionally spaced documents all day. Then it started getting sick. I had schematics for it, but wasn't a smart enough electrical engineer to fix it (I was 16). The thing would be merrily printing along, and all of a sudden decide the head wasn't where it thought was, or that it wanted to move the carriage 14" to the left, when it was at the 6" position. As people who've owned Hytypes will attest, this was the first printer (that I'm aware of) that used ramped acceleration to move the head. If you were at position 0, and wanted to move to the 14" position, it would ramp up the head up to speed in the first 2" (arbitrary number, I don't remember the actual ramp values), cruise at full speed to 13", then deaccelerate in the last inch. It was a wonderously smooth movement. Except for when it got confused. If it was at the 6" mark and thought it was at the 14" mark, it would ramp the head up, and *boom* smash into the left margin at full cruise missile speed. If you had your fingers in the way, you'd have a bloody mess. This sudden stop at max cruise usually caused the printer to jump about 4" to the left. You may remember these things weighed about 35 pounds, and when you can move 35 pounds on non-skid feet 4" into the left, you *know* it had some kinetic energy. Alas, I was young, foolish, and wanted a PC. This thing was in the way of where my new found PC would go, and since no one could seem to help me repair it (in spite of having the 11" x 14" big orange covered server manual), it was eventually disposed of. One this I never did while I had it was turn it into a scanner. With that high resolution stepping (for the period), it would have made a fairly decent, albiet coarse, B&W scanner. I remember poring over the TI CCD imagers, trying to figure a way to make it work. Ah, would I like to have my old (working) Diablo HyType-I back. That was a slick piece of printer. --John

Steve Robertson wrote: Seems like when I try to print anything,I get buffer overruns, the **_wrong chatracters printed_** ... Sorry if you have already thoght of this, some daisy wheel printers had change-able wheels, but you had to tell the printer when you changed wheels on it. The TeleVideo printer used a dip switch setting....