The SLM804 INIT ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ By Phillip White. Ever since I had Spectre, the Mac emulator, up and running on my Mega4 ST, I needed a means of printing directly to the Atari laser printer in Mac mode. Dave Small cheerfully provided an Apple imagewriter emulator for the SLM, but making a laser printer print 9 pin text and graphics is nothing short of scandalous! The alternative I was told, involved purchasing Ultrascript, a Postscript interpreter for the ST (and PC) which would allow high quality documents from the Mac to be printed on the venerable SLM. A brief explanation is in order here for the blissfully ignorant. Most laser printers are of the postscript variety. Postscript is a page description language which allows the page of a computer typeset document, to be interpreted as an exact series of instructions. Text and graphics can be defined as a text file. Postscript is machine independent, which means that for example, a document saved as a postscript file on an Apple Mac, can be printed on a laser printer connected to an IBM. Postscript files tend to be quite big. A postscript laser printer must have it's own RAM and the fonts to match the ones in the document, either installed in the printer itself or downloaded from the computer. Until recently, postscript laser printers were incredibly slow. Atari, in their infinite wisdom, decided to abandon the concept of a postscript printer (and thereby avoiding the licensing fees) and instead opted for a 'dumb' printer. The idea was that the memory of the computer would be used to draw up a page and then it would be zapped to the printer. On the surface this is very meritable, the printer costs less because there is no memory, the memory that would have been there can now be used by the computer, there is no need to keep buying font cartridges and the thing goes like the clappers. The down side is that the SLM804 snaps up 1 meg of the ST's RAM and the idea never caught on in the rest of the computer world, which meant that the SLM was only good for the ST and nothing else (try trading one in). A postscript printer will just about work with any computer, including an ST. Back to the Mac. There is some great DTP software for the Mac. The trick is to get your documents to the SLM804 at 300 DPI. Spectre can't print directly to the laser unless it thinks it is an imagewriter and quite frankly, text does not look good at 10 dots an inch or whatever the imagewriter klunks along at. We must save as a postscript file and print the document on the SLM in ST mode. To get the SLM to print postscript, we must use a Postscript interpreter. One for the ST, is Ultrascript, by Imagen. Ultrascript requires it's own fonts that must match those of the document being printed, also required are the bold and italic variations, which can lead to having quite a few fonts on board. Ultrascript works very well at interpreting most postscript files, including IBM PC and ST generated ones, but it has not always been smooth sailing as far as the Mac is concerned. When saving a postscript file on the Mac, the Apple Laserwriter must be installed as a chooser document, even though any attempt to print to it will result in sorrow. Originally to get postscript, one had to hold down the option key or somesuch when OK'ing the print, and the file would be created. Later on, a PD INIT was added which gave a save postscript file to disk button on the printer dialogue box so this became easy as pie. When Ultrascript dealt with a postscript file produced by this method, it promptly kacked itself. What became the only means of printing to the SLM, was importing all text and graphics into a well known DTP program which for some reason or other, had better postscript functions, not a problem there. The next leap forward arrived in the form of a PD rescue for the ST. One of Dave Small's mates had obviously thought about this problem and written a postscript file for Ultrascript called Startup.PS. This was called up by Ultrascript when a file was to be printed and basically allowed the previously offending postscript files to print. One thing that it now required was that no carriage returns be incorporated in the postscript file, which meant that no font substitutions or alterations could be made without going back into the Mac. On the Mac front, System 7 gallantly championed it's cause, with a disk of printing tools that once installed, gave a vastly enhanced print dialogue box with lots of postscript options depending on the application you were in. Things were finally starting to come together. But there were still problems..... Some applications still wouldn't play the game, particularly those which didn't incorporate a graphic in a document, rather, a link is made to the directory where the picture resides. In these cases the postscript file would blow out to gargantuan proportions and Ultrascript would hang. Besides the sheer hassle of... 1) Print file to disk as postscript. 2) Quit the Mac and become an ST again. 3) Run the Transverter program and copy the postscript file onto an ST partition. 4) Run Ultrascript and print the file. 5) Oops there's no space between up and tight! back to the Mac again. There had to be a better way. About a year ago, I was perusing through the ACE Bulletin board when I noticed a message which had been placed in an Atari Echo that mentioned an INIT which would allow direct to SLM printing. I jumped on this bit of news and established after some time that it was available from a company in Germany called FEARN. There is also a FEARN in California. The California connection was waiting for the release of the US paper size version so I shifted my attention towards Germany. Several enquiries around Australia revealed a total lack of knowledge for this thing. Eventually after much deliberation, I decided to go ahead and purchase the INIT which costs 176 DM (I have not got the Visa invoice back yet). A week later it was in my shaking mitts. The SLM 804 INIT is an autobooting application which emulates the Hewlett Packard Laserwriter II. It requires either a HP inkjet or laserwriter printer driver for the Mac and adequate memory for the ST. The creators are Gunther Walther & Frank Siegert. The INIT basically intercepts a call to the laserjet and draws up a page which is then sent to the SLM via the DMA port. The SLM normally gobbles up 1 meg of memory and allowances must be made for this. I had several crashes when I first installed the goodies and after removing the ramdisk I customarily use, I could get to the desktop. The manual pretty well explains what is needed for the operation of the INIT, one of the requirements is for the system heap size to be increased to allow extra room for the system. A PD program is provided for this purpose. Also required is Adobe Type manager or I would suspect, Truetype. This is to give smooth font scaling rather than smooth font blockiness. This and all the associated fonts take up memory, so it is a task to get the thing running. Does it work? You bet! Although I had some slight problems with kerning and spacing in some applications. At the time of writing I have only had 2 days to try it and the initial results look pretty good. The PD printer driver supplied is for a Deskjet, which gives good results, but the Laserjet II Macprint driver is recommended for superior quality, some fine tuning is to be expected. Supplied on the disk are some PD utilities which I have no idea as to what they do, and there is some update information in German which is handy. I do not know how many Spectre/SLM804 combinations there are in the world, but this would certainly have to be an essential item for the owners of these systems. I would like to thank Swavek Jabrzemski, for his help in this saga. SLM INIT is available from FEARN JOHANNES KRAMER Str. 62 7000 STUGGART 70 W. GERMANY Ph 0711 765 3049 Fax 0711 765 6411 Ask for Cabell, he speaks Californian