Epson JX-80 simulator

I always lamented the day that my Epson JX-80 died back in 1994. I really liked that printer because it was a color dot matrix. Today, we have color inkjets and color laser printers, but back then, the JX-80 was awesome. Even more awesome was that the Amiga printer drivers supported the JX-80. I used to love printing my DeluxePaint creations in color.

I remember the day I brought it home, hooked it up and printed graphics in color for the first time. Wow! Somehow everything was more precious in those days. I think our brains are wired for scarcity, not for abundance.

After writing a simulator for the ptouch, I thought, why not try a regular dot matrix printer. So I tried the Panasonic KX-P2123. It was pretty easy, as all I had to implement was the ESC * command (at 180 dpi) and a few other ESC codes.

Since I had the benefit of a esc p reference document it was quite straightforward.

https://files.support.epson.com/pdf/general/escp2ref.pdf

Then I thought, why not try the Epson JX-80? I ran it a few times to see what codes I hadn't implemented and saw that it printed graphics using ESC L which is 120 dpi horizontal graphics at 72 dpi vertically. The printer printhead is 72 dpi and it shifts it down 2/216 of an inch and prints again to make 144dpi vertically. So I added an interleave so that it would print a row spaced with lines spaced 2 apart, then fill in the gaps on the next pass.

I also noticed that the driver printed 4 passes for color, CMYK. I pondered on how to implement that.

Fortunately the VGA color palette for SCREEN 12 has CMYK colors.

cyan = 3
magenta = 5
yellow = 14

red = 4 (m+y)
green = 2 (c+y)
blue = 1 (c+m)

black = 0 (c+m+y)
white = 7

so all I had to do was to make a function that would convert CMY into a vga screen color. When I would print a color, I just take the screen pixel, convert that color into CMY, "add" the C,M, or Y that I'm printing by doing a binary OR for each color component (c = old c OR new c), and the PSET the pixel back to the screen, converting CMY to a vga screen color. If we are printing black, treat that as setting C,M and Y.


Once I figure out how to speed it up, either by rewriting it with more table lookups or using QB64, I'll hook it up to my Amiga and try to generate some "retro" output.

Since it's rather slow, it won't keep up with a large output stream and get a buffer overflow error. But if you keep the picture small it will work.

I use the trick of setting the windows printer driver to send the output to COM1: instead of the LPT1: port in order to get the data to my qbasic program. I hope that the Amiga will work similarly by just choosing the serial port for output.

Hmmmm, now that I've uploaded the pictures I can see just how dingy white color 7 is. Maybe I'll set white to be color 15. I can't really tell on my lousy laptop screen.




setting up the CMY table, note that you don't see color 7 as it's black (c+m+y=black).



Epson4.BAS