Re: graphics dump and the XEP80
From: Jeffrey J. McWilliams (cd827@cleveland.Freenet.Edu)
Date: 08/23/92-10:05:44 AM Z
From: cd827@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Jeffrey J. McWilliams)
Subject: Re: graphics dump and the XEP80
Date: Sun Aug 23 10:05:44 1992
In a previous article, aj848@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Michael Current) says:
>
> This spring for my Computational Physics class special project I did some
>programming and some graphing on my 130XE. Since a poster presentation was
>required, I needed some hard-copies of the graphs I produced. Simple, right?
>Not in this case. My Epson LX-810 is about as standard of a 9-pin dot-matrix
>printer you can have, but my lone printer interface is the XEP80 Interface
>Module. This in itself can be annoying because I can't print anything unless I
>have that xep80han.com file loaded. Most of my printing I do from AtariWriter
>80, so I already have the handler loaded. But now I had to load the handler,
>then use a special BASIC XIO command to return to the Antic display so I could
>print through the interface at the same time as I had a gr.8 screen displayed.
>A plea to comp.sys.atari.8bit on Usenet resulted in a couple different codings
>in BASIC for dumping a gr.8 screen to the printer. But they each froze the
>computer before the printing began! After many frustrating re-boots of the
>system I learned that once the XEP80 handler is loaded, the act of entering any
>graphics mode of 6 or higher will cause a system lock-up. Problem identified.
>
> I had two choices. One was to get a normal printer interface like
>the ICD P:R: Connection, so I could print any time I want to. I may get
>around to doing that someday. But with the presentation date fast approaching,
>I found a good work-around. Instead of dumping right to the printer, I
>adjusted the BASIC code I had to print to a data file instead. So I could run
>my program, save the graph to a file, go to DOS, load the XEP80 handler, then
>copy the data file from disk to printer. A convoluted but effective graphics
>screen dump. Project saved.
>--
>Michael Current '93 Internet: currentm@carleton.edu
>Carleton College Cleveland Free-Net: aj848
>Northfield, MN 55057 telephone: (507) 663-5181
>
>
Michael,
Your experience with printing a graphics mode 8 image to printer through
the XEP80 interface is a very interesting one.
Perhaps there is another solution to your problem, or several for that
matter.
First, if you are not interested in viewing the image, you could just
dim a string to 7680 bytes. Load the file into the string, and then
execute your USR call, or however you access your print routine,
telling the routine to start at adr(a$) for the address of the data.
If you do wish to view the image, you could tell the XEP80 to display the
image. Antic magazine did an article on the XEP80, and published some code
to download a graphics 8 type image to the XEP80 quite quickly.
If you do this though, this will only allow you to display the image, and you
would still have to use the aforementioned method to print the image to the
printer. But using the technique, you would not have to worry about
crashing the computer due to a graphics call.
Jeff McWilliams
cd827 @cleveland.freenet.edu
jjmcwill@mtus5.cts.mtu.edu
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