Getting it on (Virtual) Paper

Recompiling some command-line-launched programs on my new iMac in the hope of bringing them into the “Apple Silicon” era did mean looking back as well. I started with an emulator for the TRS-80 Model 100 and the other machines of its little family because I had specific instructions from someone who’d revised the program code. (There does seem something a little peculiar about emulating a portable computer on a desktop machine, of course.) With that taken care of, I turned to less glamorous utilities that can take a file of “Epson printer commands,” in my case most often output from a Color Computer 3 emulator, and turn it into a PDF “virtual printout.” One of them, which I’d tinkered with trying to compress its graphical results to resemble antique printouts, compiled without fuss. The other program, the output of which hadn’t looked so elongated when I’d first got it working on my previous iMac, returned multiple errors instead of an executable.
( Delving through dot-matrix details )