BlueSCSI Printer Emulation - LaserWriter IISC

[eric]

printer: emulate Apple LaserWriter IISC SCSI printer by erichelgeson · Pull Request #363 · BlueSCSI/BlueSCSI-v2

Adds device type S2S_CFG_PRINTER. A PR/ folder on the SD card registers a printer at that SCSI ID and doubles as the spool target; captured jobs land in /PR/print_NNNN.bin as a stream of CDB + leng...

github.com

Thanks to @demik we now have a reverse engineered spec for the LaserWriter IISC - and with that now you can use BlueSCSI not only as a disk/cd/network/tape/floppy/zip/mo emulator, but now also a Printer emulator

I've only done light testing but things seem to be working. I'm doing no processing currently on the BlueSCSI - only dumping the raw commands/data to a file for post processing at https://bluescsi.com/printer (you can try it out even if you don't have a BlueSCSI, there's a test file there to load).

Give it a try here (must be logged into GitHub for CI Builds) Or wait for a bit more testing and it to be merged in.

This is something akuker from PiSCSI and I had been chatting about for years and looking for these printers - glad it's been RE'd!

 

[demik]

You are welcome.

Hope I didn't make too much assumptions while working on this, will gladly help anyone here if needed.

For everyone that may want to try this:
MacOS side you want to choose the driver that come with whatever MacOS version you are running (below 7.5.1)
It comes in two variants:
- LaserWriter IISC, (for early System 6)
- Personal LW SC for late System 6 and System 7. Sometimes it's named "Personal LaserWriter SC"

You do not need any other drivers, The driver has everything backed in (no need for the generic LaserWriter driver which is only useful for Postscript printers)
The driver in either variant, was available until 7.5.0 (included). It was deprecated/removed when 7.5.1 was released. Can't find the KB anymore, but there is one that stated that the QuickDraw changes starting 7.5.1 were too big to match the driver "translator".

The printer will NOT be visible in the chooser list, just choose the driver and close the chooser. There is no routine within the driver to show something in the list. What the driver will do is scan the SCSI bus every time you print something (scan order 4, 3, 2, 1, 0, 6, 5)

There is now a pull request for Snow. Might be useful for PiSCSI
Can we use this thread for the RE feedback or shall I create another one ?

 

[Fizzbinn]

Very cool!

There are some TA/KB/TIL articles that mention the LaserWriter SC archived here:
https://savagetaylor.com/til/articles.html

System 7: Using Personal LaserWriter SC and LaserWriter IISC - TIL07861
Power Macintosh 6100 & Personal LaserWriter SC (1994-05-01) - TIL15397
Mac OS 8.x: No LaserWriter SC Support - KB030514

The last one looks like it's saying the Personal LW SC 7.0.1 driver can be used up to 7.5.1, and the LaserWriter II SC GX driver works up to 7.6.1. Any Quickdraw GX fans out there want to test that out

 

[demik]

Very cool!

There are some TA/KB/TIL articles that mention the LaserWriter SC archived here:
https://savagetaylor.com/til/articles.html

System 7: Using Personal LaserWriter SC and LaserWriter IISC - TIL07861
Power Macintosh 6100 & Personal LaserWriter SC (1994-05-01) - TIL15397
Mac OS 8.x: No LaserWriter SC Support - KB030514

The last one looks like it's saying the Personal LW SC 7.0.1 driver can be used up to 7.5.1, and the LaserWriter II SC GX driver works up to 7.6.1. Any Quickdraw GX fans out there want to test that out

Thanks! KB030514 is the one I remembered. Plenty of other info at this archive... like this driver was created for System 4.3. Might explain some of the spaghetti code.