itch.io

Hi Paul,

I am glad this is working well for you. And if you do come across any escape codes used by Tasword that I am not support, feel free to give me a shout and I will see if/how I can add support for those.

Best Regards,

Chris

Hi Paul, I am using Tasword Plus Two. I got the tap file from the World of Spectrum site.

I investigated a little deeper, the issue is indeed with the print spooler. When using the print spooler interrupts are disabled, which interferes with the driver.

Hi Paul, I played with it a little this evening... it is quite exciting that this actually works.

It does look like you have to choose option 2 when launching Tasword

Press [2] to disable buffering and print spooler

It appears the print spooler keeps the connection open to the printer server, which prevents it from sending the page to the printer. But if the print spooler is disabled everything seems to work.

Hi Paul, I would not have expected that to work at all. It is a long weekend in the States this weekend so I will definitely spin up Tasword and see if I can get this working. Thanks for trying this, because I honestly wondered about it and just thought that would never work... As I like to say, "I thought myself out of a solution"

Hi Paul, that is correct. Once the driver is installed on the Next you can open the stream and provide the IP address of the printer server to route the printing through the printer server to the target printer.

I am traveling at the moment so please excuse the delays in my responses, but let me know if you need more help.

Regards,

Chris

HI Paul, the printer server is waiting for the Next to connect to the printer. That will happen when you start printing from the next. The next will connect, print and then disconnect. On the next side you should use the IP address of the computer you are running the printer server on.

regards, Chris

Hi Darius,

Thank you so much for purchasing the editor.

I will tackle the easy one first, you can set the click sound in the settings file. When you first ran the editor (latest version) it created a zed.cfg file in the 'c:/sys' folder. Open the file in the editor and you will see two setting related to the sound when pressing a key.

Open the settings:

.zed /sys/zed.cfg

Edit the following entries in the file

key_beep_cycles=3
key_beep_period=60

Press "EXTEND MODE + 2" and the settings will save and reload, press a key and you should start hearing a click. You can play with the values, until you find something that works. Basically, the cycles control the duration, and the period controls the frequency/pitch.

I will take a look at doing word wrap, it is something that I wondered if anyone would care about. I will take a look at adding the capability.

Happy New Year!

Hi Leonis, thanks for sharing that. I had seen another post regarding the libraries, in fact I plan on using the joystick library myself. I did not see (or remember) that Iáń had offered to include them as standard libraries. I will reach out and confirm that with him and add them.

Thanks!

Thanks for the suggestions, I am working on adding some new features to the compiler and I will update the documentation with your suggestions.

I have actually had some issues with `.run` you might have seen I use it in `zncdemo.bas` the issue with it is that it does not return to BASIC correctly. For `ZIDE` I actually included a small inline assembler routine to launch DOT files. But for just local testing `.run` does the trick, you can also use `../spriteballs.dot` which runs the DOT command from the current directory rather than searching the `dot` directory.

Thanks Simon, there is a method to the madness. I did the fun bit and open sourced it so thr community can help with the rest 😀

I am joking of course, but i would love to have others join and contribute to the libraries and to improving the core compiler, there is still a lot to do there.

I am still working on the documentation; I will prioritize the information on the data types etc.

• char/byte and int are signed
• pointers are unsigned
• all arguments are promoted to 2 bytes (char and byte included), this is important to know if you want to access arguments in assembly code
• parameter are passed left to right and put on the stack, so the first parameter is further up the stack. Some of the samples include assembly functions that show how to access the parameters passed to a function

Of course some of this might change, the compiler is still very new and evolving. I want to support Next native functionality as much as I can from within the language. For example you can already quite easily compile code that will be assembled directly into banks in memory. This is mostly useful for building NEX files and of course if you just want to generate executable code directly in memory.

Thanks Simon, :) yes the pokes are scary. Here is my comment from the code 

PLAYER    equ $5cf0        ;Player address (Goodluck)

I have a fix for the issue you raised, I was a little mathematically challenged. I had reserved space for CHANS but only 6 bytes, not sure why. I have updated it and will release a new version this weekend once I get a chance to test it a little more.

Thank you and Happy New Year to you as well!!!

Hi Magicuk65, that is great, I only tested it dumping a file to the printer from CP/M so it is good to know that things like Wordstar can work as well! 

I am curious, to support CP/M I had to add driver command 2 that can be used to control the line end translation ("Disable CR translation to CRLF") did you need to use that to get the printing from Wordstar to not create extra blank lines between lines of text?

Hi,

If you are still interested, I have a new Print Server that should now work with any printer that is accessible from your computer. It also has the added benefit of being able to support different fonts. 

Tags · taylorza/NextPrintServer

Best Regards,

Chris

Hi,

I put the code for the server on Github and have a tagged release that has a few bug fixes since the original you tested for me.

Tags · taylorza/NextPrintServer

Best Regards,

Chris

Hi,

Would you mind testing the new version, it is a desktop application with a UI that allows you to select the font and the target printer. I just want to make sure the standalone .NET application works on a machine other than mine.

NextPrintServer.zip

Best Regards,

Chris

Perfect, thanks for testing. I will clean it up and package it for the community.

Best Regards,

Chris

Hi,

If you get a chance, can you please test the new RawPrintServer.  To test it, I wrote this as a quick .NET App, hopefully you can run it, it is packaged as a self-contained app so you should not need any additional dependencies. If this works, I will add support for specifying alternate fonts, custom margins etc.

RawPrintServer.exe

Regards,

Chris

The one other issue with RAW printing from Windows is that there are two supported models either "RAW" or "XPS_PASS". Can you check your driver model and version and share that.

In the meantime, I will write a new Print server that uses GDI that would be guaranteed to work. Would you mind providing some testing support as I only have limited printers on hand and of course they all work, so if you would not mind that would be great.

Hi,

It looks like the driver is not closing the connection after the print job is complete so the WinPrintServer is waiting for more data. Are you calling "Close #3" or uninstalling the driver after printing? If so, comment that out and see if there is a difference.

Best Regards,

Chris

NOTE: There are at least two PCL 3GUI printers that are reported to work, so the issue might be a little more nuanced. HP OfficeJet Pro 7720 and HP Officejet Pro 8600 N911a are PCL 3GUI printers that have been reported as working.

For others that come along here, it looks like the issue is with printers that use PCL 3GUI. From HP's site

"PCL3GUI remains proprietary. HP uses it in the HP DeskJet series printers and DesignJet larger format printers (plotters)."

HP Developers Portal | HP Printer Command Languages (PCL)

Hi Paul,

You do need to install the driver after any reset, you can use the ".uninstall" to uninstall the driver.  ".INSTALL" and ".UNINSTALL" are standard NextOS utilities to install/uninstall drivers, but the drivers are not permanently installed like they would be on other operating systems.

There are no special requirements for the installation of the driver as long as it installs successfully.
As for the video mode, as long as your Next is joined to the wifi and you are communicating successfully with the wifi module there should not be anything special that needs to be done.

Having said that, there have been some printers that just did not seem to work, I track the reports on the wiki (Home · taylorza/zxn-wifiprn Wiki (github.com)).

Did you try using the WindowsPrinterServer, I wrote that to support printers that are not connected to the wifi, but it will work for wifi printers as well. Testing with that might give us more information. I would be very eager to get to the route of this issue because other than one Canon printer I have not had any reports of the driver not working. 

Other things you can check, make sure your printer has port 9100 enabled. This is the port used by the driver to connect to the printer, most home printers do not block this port, but some higher end printers might have raw printing disabled.

Best Regards,

Chris

@funkheld, you can already use "nreg". Looking at your example I think the problem you might be having is that you are putting the opcodes on the left, so the assembler will treat those as labels. 

I normally put 2 spaces before the opcodes, but there should be at least one, labels must be started right up against the ';'. This is the same convention used in sjasmplus.

Thank you, I am glad you are finding it useful!

Thank you.