russ@Alliant.COM (Russell McFatter) (09/28/89)
The Situation: I own a Tandy 2000HD, a CGP-220 color ink-jet printer, and
(quite a while ago) picked up the GEM Collection back when Radio Shack was
selling it for only $90. The 2000 and CGP-220 make a good combination-- the
2000 has a 640x400x8 (of 15 colors) display, and the CGP does 640 dots per
line in 8 colors. Tandy provides a graphics driver that works beautifully
(nice color screen prints, but, alas, only from BASIC).
The Problem: GEM is a nice addition to the Tandy, and the box even advertises
"supports color ink-jet printer", but, alas, the printer supported is the IBM
Color Inkjet, not the CGP-220. (Identical hardware, but the ROMS have been
changed to protect the innocent). This in the package that you BUY from Radio
Shack.
Background: The people at Digital Research say: We didn't write the driver
for the CGP-220 because Tandy never paid us to do so. You can write the
driver yourself, for just $1500 (that's $1,000 for the programmer's toolbox,
and $500 for the printer driver development kit). WHAT A BARGAIN!! I can
spend $1500 so I can WRITE MY OWN printer driver for a $90 desktop package.
(sigh). The people at Tandy say that they were thinking of commissioning a
CGP-220 driver but changed their minds when DR got themselves into a "look and
feel" hassle. This left us GEM owners out in the cold, since DR doesn't supply
the driver, information about the drivers, or even the file formats for
their own .IMG files.
Finally, the question: Is anyone out there in netland in the same boat? Has
anyone done anything about it?
(Sure, this could have been a standard "does anybody have..." query, but I
wanted to be just a little more interesting than that. :-)
--- Russ McFatter
russ@alliant.alliant.COM