Playing with ap2000

After reading about the Action Printer 2000 in mess I have been fascinated with actually seeing it run. I finally was able to get mame 167 compiled in ubuntu. I don't know what I'm doing so it's been pretty frustrating trying to get everything set up.


First, I tried ubuntu 15.10 and I was getting video corruption with the Intel 4 series integrated graphics. Then I tried ubuntu 14.04 and I got the same corruption. I read a post where the problem lies with an uneven amount of memory. 3GB created corruption. After pulling a 1GB stick, 2GB seems to be run fine with no problems.

I found Ramiro Polla's dummy centronics driver and was able to get it compiled with:

make SUBTARGET=dmcntr

https://github.com/ramiropolla/mame/commits/dmcntr

https://github.com/mamedev/mame/issues/350

and after the magic invocation (how I struggled to figure this out) I got to see it run. Yay!

./messdmcntr64 dmcntr -centronics ap2000 -window


First came up a layout that filled the screen, but after fiddling with the video options I could see the printer output.

I had to change the /dev/lp0 to just plain old lp0 and do a "mkfifo lp0" and then I could pipe stuff to see it print.

Fantastic!