Stretching a Few Limits
Sep. 27th, 2025 06:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerNoticing how the simulated ImageWriter printouts I’d winkled out of the Snow emulator looked a little squeezed compared to the characters on screen, and supposing this had something to do with the dot-matrix printer’s horizontal resolution not being an exact multiple of the horizontal resolution of the original Macintosh screen, had seemed something I’d just have to shrug about for the moment. Beyond the question of just how much “dot matrix aesthetic” I need in my life, it remained an involved process to build up a file of printer commands.
Turning to a different sort of “old computer” indulgence I fall back to every month, I picked up and skimmed through the physical magazines now exactly forty years old I have ready to hand. After finishing 80 Micro I turned to Macworld, and in a help column there I just so happened to see an explanation of an option tucked away in the “Page Setup” dialog box that promised to adjust ImageWriter horizontal resolution in the context of getting MacPaint images pasted into MacWrite to look right. When I tried it with a little bit of text, it did look more like the on-screen characters. I then wondered what sort of tradeoff that really involved and went through the process of turning more text into printer commands. In regular (compressed) form there were ample margins but everything was centred; in “Tall Adjusted” form everything wound up shifted towards the right-hand side of the paper. I did at least consider “punching the printout and putting it in a cover.”
My attention did drift to MAME; the 68000-powered Macs don’t appear to have their serial ports emulated there, but that was an option with the later 68030 machines. After trying to figure out how to capture port output in that emulator and managing it with an Apple II, though, I was left wondering if MAME indeed had serial ports fully implemented for any Macintosh in it.
After that, however, I happened to look into Snow’s source code to the point of guessing just what limited the amount of data it could keep in its printer port terminal window. The temptation to install Rust, the language the emulator is developed in, and see about increasing that limit sprouted in me. At last, I took it and doubled the limit to 16K just as a first experiment. After my version of the emulator had built, I did indeed seem able to build up more printer output. This might make printing larger documents a bit more a matter of “waiting to pause” rather than “jumping on the pause button.” It’s a stopgap while I wait to see if a much more accomplished programmer than me builds in the “save output to a file” option, of course.
Turning to a different sort of “old computer” indulgence I fall back to every month, I picked up and skimmed through the physical magazines now exactly forty years old I have ready to hand. After finishing 80 Micro I turned to Macworld, and in a help column there I just so happened to see an explanation of an option tucked away in the “Page Setup” dialog box that promised to adjust ImageWriter horizontal resolution in the context of getting MacPaint images pasted into MacWrite to look right. When I tried it with a little bit of text, it did look more like the on-screen characters. I then wondered what sort of tradeoff that really involved and went through the process of turning more text into printer commands. In regular (compressed) form there were ample margins but everything was centred; in “Tall Adjusted” form everything wound up shifted towards the right-hand side of the paper. I did at least consider “punching the printout and putting it in a cover.”
My attention did drift to MAME; the 68000-powered Macs don’t appear to have their serial ports emulated there, but that was an option with the later 68030 machines. After trying to figure out how to capture port output in that emulator and managing it with an Apple II, though, I was left wondering if MAME indeed had serial ports fully implemented for any Macintosh in it.
After that, however, I happened to look into Snow’s source code to the point of guessing just what limited the amount of data it could keep in its printer port terminal window. The temptation to install Rust, the language the emulator is developed in, and see about increasing that limit sprouted in me. At last, I took it and doubled the limit to 16K just as a first experiment. After my version of the emulator had built, I did indeed seem able to build up more printer output. This might make printing larger documents a bit more a matter of “waiting to pause” rather than “jumping on the pause button.” It’s a stopgap while I wait to see if a much more accomplished programmer than me builds in the “save output to a file” option, of course.