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- Path: sparky!uunet!pipex!warwick!uknet!doc.ic.ac.uk!citycs!sheun
- From: sheun@cs.city.ac.uk (Sheun Olatunbosun)
- Newsgroups: comp.sys.cbm
- Subject: GEOS and drivers
- Message-ID: <1992Nov9.095754.577@city.cs>
- Date: 9 Nov 92 09:57:54 GMT
- Sender: news@city.cs (News)
- Organization: City University, London
- Lines: 58
-
- Attention to all you GEOS gurus out there.
-
- I have GEOS v1.3 which I love using but, I am presented with two problems.
-
- 1. I have an Star LC-20 printer with a centronics interface. I'm using it
- with an Epson-Fx 80 driver under GEOS. When I print text files, the output
- is sometimes corrupted (one graphic line out of every one hundred), and I
- believe the problem is that the computer is sending data too fast to the
- printer.
- Could someone tell me the printer lines (and their connections on the
- C64 user port) which GEOS drivers use? With the interface cable that I
- made, I know that it uses the following signals (I do not remember the
- pin connections off hand, but if anybody is interested in making a parallel
- cable then I'll dig up the details).
-
- Strobe, Data 0-7, Acknowledge, Printer Busy
-
- On the other hand, would being in possession of a Star LC-20 GEOS printer
- driver solve the problem?
-
- 2. I am using a joystick to navigate around the GEOS workbench. I would ideally
- like to make use of my NEOS mouse, but I only have the 1531 mouse input
- driver. My NEOS mouse produces exactly the same signals as for a joystick
- when moved in one of the eight directions. However, the signal toggles from
- a logical value of 0 to 1 depending on how quickly the mouse is moved (I've
- investigated this under BASIC).
- Could some please give me some technical information about how a GEOS input
- driver is written. For example, what load address should the driver have,
- does the driver routine update x,y coordinate locations specifying the
- current cursor position, what other GEOS routines need calling to keep in
- proper working with the GEOS environment, must the driver routine return
- any required values in the processor registers, etc?
- I know that I could find all of this information in the GEOS programmer
- reference manual, but could somebody out there help me at a cheaper price?
-
- Any help considered a plus.
-
-
- Oh. My pet project at the moment is writing a m/c routine in BASIC RAM v2.2
- which will redirect standard printer output from the serial port
- to the parallel port. The code appears in RAM where I have copied the BASIC
- and KERNAL ROM data to the underlying RAM. I've written the code on top of
- cassette routines in KERNAL RAM since I no longer use a datasette (appallingly
- slow). While my code works okay in BASIC (I can do the following code), it
- does not seem to be compatible with my disk drive. I am intercepting serial
- routines (OPEN,LISTEN,SERIAL OUT, and CLOSE) to detect when the printer
- (device #4 or #5) is being accessed.
-
- open 1,4,7
- cmd 1
- list (a program sent to the parallel interface)
- close 1
-
-
- Oh well, I'll keep plugging at it. What are you other programmers doing out
- there? Or has the newsgroup become more application-user orientated?
-
- Sheun
-