A new old bug in the printer ROM?

[Christoph Giesselink]

Hi Thomas,

(01-16-2023 07:25 PM)ThomasF Wrote:  I also noticed that the existing emulators don't emulate the 82143 that well, since the pixels are not correctly dimensioned (they are rectangular, not squared) so e.g. when plotting with the 'HP' in the PPC ROM the lines are not aligned. How it is with physical 82240 HW I don't know since I don't have one.

That's wrong, they looked like rectangular because you can't stop heating immediately. So when you print out On/Off/On/Off/... the On pixels would be longer. But they are squared.

The HP plotting looks different because a 82143A character has a height of 7 pixel but then you have a gap of 4 lines before the next printable line begins.

The 82240 characters have a height of 8 pixel with no gap to the next line.

(01-16-2023 07:25 PM)ThomasF Wrote:  But, looking at the datastream over IR shows the following:

Chr:ESC{6:00.08.04.7E.04.08}

This is a trick I first seen at the WP34S. The Roman8 character set of the 82240 has no up-arrow (only ECMA94) and so the output is a mixture of text and graphic, in this case the up arrow is graphic.

It's definitely not the output of the printer ROM. SwissMicros is using an interpreter in it's emulation to translate the output of the printer ROM to the commands of the 82240. This may imply that the printer ROM is modified but not necessarily.

Meindert talked in his 2022 Allschwil meeting presentation about a 41CL printing solution which may use a modified version of my 82240B printer simulation. Meanwhile Meindert and I, with most work done by Meindert, expanded the 82240B printer simulation by a 82143 mode. The new mode use an own 82143 character set, using 168 instead of 166 columns and using a font with 7 pixel height and a gap of 4 pixel to the next line.

Since Saturday afternoon I'm able to plot with 'HP' of the PPC ROM on this printer simulation with a modified V41 as data source. The V41 is using an unmodified Printer ROM.