keenerb
Veteran Member
I really have no idea how this happened, but here I am.
Since I've spent literally months tinkering with various vintage printers, modern printers, and printer emulators I suppose I might as well share some of what I've found regarding vintage printers, new printers, and connectivity options between printers and modern and vintage systems.
The vintage stuff first:
Old inkjets are EVERYWHERE and CHEAP. They also have been an ENORMOUS waste of time. Yes that's been the general consensus on various vintage forums for a long time, but I had to see how bad it really was for myself. Hard to find good ink, the ink heads clog quickly if they sit idle, waste tanks are often already completely full, printers that cycle over and over agagin after powering on, etc etc. the usual sad inkjet stories. HOWEVER, I did have great luck with several HP Deskjet 800 series with parallel AND usb ports, like the 832c. The 832c has actually been working very well, I scheduled a print job that prints a small cyan/magenta/black pattern and it runs once a week, this seems to keep the print heads clear of clogs.
As far as dot matrix printers go, I have yet to find a dot matrix that failed to work. Every sh*tty, beat up, cracked case dot matrix I picked up on Facebook market place or on ebay or from facebook friends has been completely operational. This technology must have been practically bulletproof, every Epson Actionprinter T1000, T3000, Tandy DMP105/133/130, Epson LQ800, handful of Okidatas, and another half-dozen have all powered on and will run self-test printouts and print from computers just fine. Old dried up ribbons haven't been much of a problem, the old WD40 trick works great and so does transplanting modern/brand new ribbons into old cartridges so far. Tractor feed paper is a little more expensive than it used to be but it's still out there and it's still tremendously satisfying to rip the little borders off of after you print a few pages out.
Laser printers were a very mixed bag, at least as far as vintage ones go. Paper feed problems plagued the two old laserjets (II and III) I tried, one eventually started complaining front panel was open when it clearly wasn't and switch tested just fine. I ordered a handful of toner cartridges that arrived with the toner as a rock-solid block inside the cartridge, one of which destroyed the internal mechanisms of a LJIII. Parts, drums, fusers, etc. seem hugely difficult to source. I tried two Laserjet 1100's (I believe from mid-2000's?) which worked fairly well overall, but were't exactly my idea of a "vintage" laser printer. They also still had infrequent paper feed errors and one died with a pretty impressive pop and smell of smoke. RIP that capacitor.
I also tried some modern hardware.
I was unable to find new parallel port-equipped modern laser printers, unsurprisingly.
Epson makes brand-new 9 and 24-pin printers of various sizes and features, with USB, serial, AND parallel interfaces. I picked up an LX-350 for 9-pin, and an LQ590II for 24-pin. They work absolutely perfectly with old applications using common 9-pin and 24-pin drivers like the LX800 and LQ-570 respectively. They are also very fast and have a lot of nice options I don't remember from my vintage printers like auto tear-off advance and switching to single-sheet feed without unloading tractor-feed paper, and pretty advanced paper handling options like front/rear/bottom paper inputs and straight-path feeding for labels.
Surprisingly, modern HP inkjets still support native PCL of at least some compatible level, because it's possible to use old deskjet drivers to print to them! Using a Deskjet 500c/550c/610c/832c driver with my SmartTank 6001 provided varying quality of printouts but they were all exactly as I'd expect from the respective vintage printer. This was all very much a surprise.
I also picked up a Retroprinter, which is a centronics interface daughterboard that attaches to a raspberry pi and functions as a virtual printer, rendering pages to PDF and can emulate many printers including Epson 9/24 pin, Deskjet, IBM, and a hefty number of other devices. It works very well, and can actually function as a dumb interface and pass raw LPT input directly to an attached usb printer which allows my DOS apps to print directly to my HP smart tank as if it were an old Deskjet 500/600 device. It worked well, although some oddities regarding page borders cause the printout on the retroprinter to be offcenter compared to the real printer output, but that wasn't of any real significance and probably a setting I haven't figured out yet.
As far as connectivity goes, I've been using an interesting phoneline printer sharing network to connect my three vintage machines to a DB25 switchbox, but it essentially replaces some DB25 cables and a switchbox so it's not particularly interesting. The old printers worked fine with the old computers and old software, which was no surprise, but the new Epson printers worked perfectly as well. I have ordered a parallel port to USB active adapter which promises to allow vintage computers to print to modern USB printers but it hasn't arrived yet, it'll be a little while to ship from Germany.
Amusingly enough, most of these vintage machines worked perfectly well with MODERN systems. I used a variety of interface methods, the two that worked the best were a USB to LPT cable (out of four I tried, three did not work!) and some old parallel port print servers off of Ebay that were basically dedicated LPD (line printer daemon) servers that Windows 11 supported just fine. Windows 11 still maintains drivers for HP printers back to before the 500, and Epson provides new, supported printer drivers for their current dot-matrix printers that work just fine with the old 9/24 pin printers. Printouts of modern documents on the 9-pin printers look pretty terrible, but I'm HUGELY impressed at the quality of the 24-pin printer output for black and white documents. Color starts to get pretty ugly but a monochrome document looked good enough that I'm essentially using an LQ590II as my daily printer even from Windows.
I also learned that an application called Printfil exists that allows DOSBOX-X to print to physical printers, and by leveraging some Netgear PS101 print servers I can now print to any of my vintage or new printers from within Dosbox on windows just like they are attached locally to an MSDOS desktop system. It's been working very well so far.
Hopefully that was interesting to at least one person other than myself.
Since I've spent literally months tinkering with various vintage printers, modern printers, and printer emulators I suppose I might as well share some of what I've found regarding vintage printers, new printers, and connectivity options between printers and modern and vintage systems.
The vintage stuff first:
Old inkjets are EVERYWHERE and CHEAP. They also have been an ENORMOUS waste of time. Yes that's been the general consensus on various vintage forums for a long time, but I had to see how bad it really was for myself. Hard to find good ink, the ink heads clog quickly if they sit idle, waste tanks are often already completely full, printers that cycle over and over agagin after powering on, etc etc. the usual sad inkjet stories. HOWEVER, I did have great luck with several HP Deskjet 800 series with parallel AND usb ports, like the 832c. The 832c has actually been working very well, I scheduled a print job that prints a small cyan/magenta/black pattern and it runs once a week, this seems to keep the print heads clear of clogs.
As far as dot matrix printers go, I have yet to find a dot matrix that failed to work. Every sh*tty, beat up, cracked case dot matrix I picked up on Facebook market place or on ebay or from facebook friends has been completely operational. This technology must have been practically bulletproof, every Epson Actionprinter T1000, T3000, Tandy DMP105/133/130, Epson LQ800, handful of Okidatas, and another half-dozen have all powered on and will run self-test printouts and print from computers just fine. Old dried up ribbons haven't been much of a problem, the old WD40 trick works great and so does transplanting modern/brand new ribbons into old cartridges so far. Tractor feed paper is a little more expensive than it used to be but it's still out there and it's still tremendously satisfying to rip the little borders off of after you print a few pages out.
Laser printers were a very mixed bag, at least as far as vintage ones go. Paper feed problems plagued the two old laserjets (II and III) I tried, one eventually started complaining front panel was open when it clearly wasn't and switch tested just fine. I ordered a handful of toner cartridges that arrived with the toner as a rock-solid block inside the cartridge, one of which destroyed the internal mechanisms of a LJIII. Parts, drums, fusers, etc. seem hugely difficult to source. I tried two Laserjet 1100's (I believe from mid-2000's?) which worked fairly well overall, but were't exactly my idea of a "vintage" laser printer. They also still had infrequent paper feed errors and one died with a pretty impressive pop and smell of smoke. RIP that capacitor.
I also tried some modern hardware.
I was unable to find new parallel port-equipped modern laser printers, unsurprisingly.
Epson makes brand-new 9 and 24-pin printers of various sizes and features, with USB, serial, AND parallel interfaces. I picked up an LX-350 for 9-pin, and an LQ590II for 24-pin. They work absolutely perfectly with old applications using common 9-pin and 24-pin drivers like the LX800 and LQ-570 respectively. They are also very fast and have a lot of nice options I don't remember from my vintage printers like auto tear-off advance and switching to single-sheet feed without unloading tractor-feed paper, and pretty advanced paper handling options like front/rear/bottom paper inputs and straight-path feeding for labels.
Surprisingly, modern HP inkjets still support native PCL of at least some compatible level, because it's possible to use old deskjet drivers to print to them! Using a Deskjet 500c/550c/610c/832c driver with my SmartTank 6001 provided varying quality of printouts but they were all exactly as I'd expect from the respective vintage printer. This was all very much a surprise.
I also picked up a Retroprinter, which is a centronics interface daughterboard that attaches to a raspberry pi and functions as a virtual printer, rendering pages to PDF and can emulate many printers including Epson 9/24 pin, Deskjet, IBM, and a hefty number of other devices. It works very well, and can actually function as a dumb interface and pass raw LPT input directly to an attached usb printer which allows my DOS apps to print directly to my HP smart tank as if it were an old Deskjet 500/600 device. It worked well, although some oddities regarding page borders cause the printout on the retroprinter to be offcenter compared to the real printer output, but that wasn't of any real significance and probably a setting I haven't figured out yet.
As far as connectivity goes, I've been using an interesting phoneline printer sharing network to connect my three vintage machines to a DB25 switchbox, but it essentially replaces some DB25 cables and a switchbox so it's not particularly interesting. The old printers worked fine with the old computers and old software, which was no surprise, but the new Epson printers worked perfectly as well. I have ordered a parallel port to USB active adapter which promises to allow vintage computers to print to modern USB printers but it hasn't arrived yet, it'll be a little while to ship from Germany.
Amusingly enough, most of these vintage machines worked perfectly well with MODERN systems. I used a variety of interface methods, the two that worked the best were a USB to LPT cable (out of four I tried, three did not work!) and some old parallel port print servers off of Ebay that were basically dedicated LPD (line printer daemon) servers that Windows 11 supported just fine. Windows 11 still maintains drivers for HP printers back to before the 500, and Epson provides new, supported printer drivers for their current dot-matrix printers that work just fine with the old 9/24 pin printers. Printouts of modern documents on the 9-pin printers look pretty terrible, but I'm HUGELY impressed at the quality of the 24-pin printer output for black and white documents. Color starts to get pretty ugly but a monochrome document looked good enough that I'm essentially using an LQ590II as my daily printer even from Windows.
I also learned that an application called Printfil exists that allows DOSBOX-X to print to physical printers, and by leveraging some Netgear PS101 print servers I can now print to any of my vintage or new printers from within Dosbox on windows just like they are attached locally to an MSDOS desktop system. It's been working very well so far.
Hopefully that was interesting to at least one person other than myself.
