Printing from the PC Card

7 Printing from the PC card

There are a range of ways in which your PC Card can be configured to print. These cater for all the possible combinations of host, card and printer. To give this flexibility is necessarily a little complex. Here we explain how to do what you want.

Printing from expansion cards

With a PC expansion card you have two possible printer ports – one on the PC card, and one on the host computer. DOS also recognises two logical printer streams caled LPT1 and LPT2 (Line PrinTer). PRN is a synonym for LPT1.

The Printing option in !PCConfig allows you to control the connection between these logical printer streams & physical printer ports.

Ignore RISCOS printer stream connects the LPT1 print stream to the connector on the PC Card and disables LPT2.

Use RISCOS printer stream for LPT1 connects the LPT1 print stream to the RISCOS printer stream and connects the LPT2 print stream to the connector on the PC Card.

Use RISCOS printer stream for LPT2 connects the LPT1 print stream to the connector on the PC Card, and connects the LPT2 print stream to the RISCOS printer stream.

The port on the PC Expansion Card itself is ‘real PC’ hardware and thus is bidirectional, so any parallel port device can be plugged in here, for example dongles, sound cards, Ethernet adaptors. Note that some devices, when plugged in here, can cause the PC Card’s self-tests to fail, thus disabling this port.

If this happens to you then you need to use the SETPRN utility in the Drivers.Printer directory on the release floppy. The Readme_prn file explains how to use it.
The port on the host computer for some Acorn computers, including A300 and A400 series and A3000, can only send data, so it can generally only be used for printing, not dongles etc. However, using this port has the advantage that you don’t have to move the printer from one socket to another when printing from both RISCOS and DOS.

For the typical configuration, with one printer which is plugged into the host computer, set Use RISCOS printer Stream to LPT1.

Printing from second processor cards

The second processor card does not have its own parallel port, so it uses the host port. You have a choice of two ways of doing this.

Connecting the port bidirectionally, exactly as if it were a real printer port, which stops RISC OS from using it whilst !PC is running

Use RISC OS Printer Stream, which connects a PC card print stream to the host computer’s print stream.

These methods are mutually exclusive. You must not use both at once as the printer output can only go to one place.

If a bidirectional connection is made, DOS port LPT1becomes the host computer’s parallel port.
See Printing on page 19 for details of how to select these options using !PCConfig.

Selecting the printer driver in DOS/Windows

Once the printer streams are assigned you just have to use the appropriate logical stream from DOS/Windows. Most applications will default to LPT1, so if you have configured this to be connected to the host printer stream (the default) then printing will automatically come out on your existing printer.

DOS does not need to have a printer driver selected, but Windows and some applications (for example WordPerfect for DOS) do. Just pick the driver for your printer.

TurboDrivers

If you have a Computer Concepts TurboDriver then it affects your PC Card printing.

With second processor cards you cannot use the parallel port for bidirectional work as both the ‘dongled’ cable and its software are likely to corrupt data.

The TurboDriver queues data on the RISC OS print stream (as opposed to data sent to a RISC OS printer driver), which can make printing with the TurboDriver installed much slower than without it. The best solution is to fit a printer switch so that RISC OS prints through the turbodriver cable, and the PC Card prints through a normal lead.

Network printing

Because of the differing ways in which DOS and RISC OS handle printing it is currently impossible to print from the PC card via RISCOS across a network.
As this User Guide went to press a solution to this difficulty was under discussion. If you need to print in this way, contact Aleph One for up-to-date information.

Direct laser printing

Direct laser printers attached to the Acorn computer (eg ArcLaser, Laser Direct) can be used when printing via the Acorn computer is selected and the direct laser printer is configured with an Epson-compatible printer emulator. Consult the documentation supplied with your direct laser printer for more information.

Aleph One Ltd. 64-66

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