kabir@phoenix.princeton.edu (Kabir Roy-chowdhury) (05/02/88)
I am sorry to be negative in my first contribution to this newsgroup, but we do have a peculiar problem with our Masscomp-system, and this is to inform and, possibly, to get help. We have two Masscomp MC-500 workstations in our LAN, and the peri- pherals include two C-Itoh dot-matrix printers. Indeed the bit-image graphics capabilitiy of the printers was the reason why the workstations were so configured. We started with the version 2.4 of the RTU and wrote some application software to dump the screen on to the printer. Much to our surprise, the code stopped working after we updated to version 3.1 of the RTU. Calls to Masscomp customer-support caused more disappointment. The person at the other end could not understand the problem at first, after long discussions she opined that Masscomp does not support screendump on C-Itoh printers. I tried to impress that we were not using screendump, but using our own code and the capabilities of the Masscomp-supported device ... I tried in vain to mention upward-compatibilty etc., finally I gave up. This and some other similar 'incidents' led to our cancelling the software-support contract. We finally reasoned that our code does not work on v3.1 because the lp-driver must have been radically changed, and that it is no more possible to access it in the 'raw' mode. Consequently, all the control-characters needed to set the printer in different modes now get interpreted by the driver. Of course we may wrong in this diagnosis. Question: Does any one else in the user community faced a similar problem? Any solutions? Of course we could run our code if we reverted back to v2.4 ... but surely there should be a better way. -- / / / Habuder Talpukure Babuder Dalkukure ... /_ / ____ /____ * ___ ARPA: kabir@weasel.princeton.edu / \ ----/ / / / / / BITNET: kabir@PUCC.bitnet / \ /___/ /____/ / / USPS: M-58, Guyot Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544 [ The tty driver did change substantially between RTU 2.4 and 3.1. RAW mode as such is still supported. I will assume you recompiled your code using the new 3.1 libraries and the new compilers (the libraries are critical, the compiler is not...in fact, some argue that the old compilers are better in terms of the parsers than the new compilers). If you did not, then that is most likely the problem. I know of many people who do screendumps of various natures, so I don't think RTU 3.1 is the problem. Recent versions of sp-40 contain the source to the inkjet screendump program "scrdump". You might look at that code to see if it substantially different from the one you wrote. -- sob]