Amiga 600 and a printer

[arti040]

Hi,
I've just got Star LC-20 printer and I thought, it'd be fun to make a use of it. Few questions are bothering me:
1. can I connect it to A600?
2. where to find a proper driver or should I use generic one?
3. and the last question - is it true, I need to cut pin number 14 first or I'll burn the printer?

[prowler]

Hi Piotr,

I cannot answer your questions, I'm afraid.

I'm posting here to advise you that Amiga parallel ports differ from the parallel ports on PCs which you may be more familiar with, and with which your printer is probably more compatible.

You probably know this already, or you would not have posted here, but to avoid damage to your printer and/or Amiga, please do not try connect them until you have received some advice.

[arti040]

Yea, I know it differs and I will not connect them unless I will be 100% sure, what to do

[Merlin]

The Star printer has Epson emulation (most parallel printers of that era have) and if memory serves, there are a bank of DIP switches to set this and other functions on or off on the printer. Turn Epson emulation on and use the Epson LX driver in Workbench. I had a Star LC-10 back in the '90s and that's how I set mine up. It worked fine in Final Writer and Wordworth.

Don't cut the cables - I never had to.

[fgh]

Epson mode would be DIP 1-1 ON according to the manual

[bubbob42]

Connecting any parallel printer is not a problem except if you want to use an Amiga 1000.

[Predseda]

I used to have Star-LC20 with Amiga 600 back in those days and it worked fine without cutting any pin. The only thing I remember I had to do was replacing of some char-rom chip to allow the printer use local language symbols. I remember I have purchased that eprom from an official printer dealer, ah those were wonderful times

[bdb]

While the PC parallel port evolved to do other things than act as a Centronics printing port, the Amiga was primarily intended as a printer port (yes, the 1000 requires a gender changer) so any printer with a 36-D Centronics port will work on it. One may need either a default mode (Epson, postscript, PCL, HP inkjet) for the printer if an Amiga driver doesn't exist.

Enjoy your A600 and I pray you can find good ribbons for the Star printer.

[I still use my Amy with Final Writer and a Dell 5130cdn workgroup printer for documents.]

[mikey2002kent]

I use a Star NL-10 with my Amiga 1200. Always used a standard parallel cable and Generic or Epson Drivers built into workbench.

Prints from just about any Program/Game if required.

Its gonna be hard work to find ribbons for old dot matrix printers though. I was lucky enough to come across a job lot of 10 ribbons for my printer many years ago on ebay that a guy found in the back of his shop. I'll be sorted for the next 50 years then lol.

[bdb]

The ribbons are still "available," but most are old stock and dry; the can be revived with an oil like WD40, but the results are fuzzy and not professional.