Printer output viewer dialog

[Leandro Jardim]

BASin have a dialog for viewing the printer output while its being sent to the printer. It even allows the user to save the image to disk. This would be incredibly useful on WinUAE to preview or save the output to print it in Paint another day. A good example is when the Windows printer is not working, either when it broke or when we was installing Windows on an entire day and we are too tired to finish finding and installing its drivers only to have some fun with WinUAE.

[Toni Wilen]

Don't see any need for emulator support, just print to some virtual printer, even Windows "Microsoft XPS Document Writer" can be used.

[Leandro Jardim]

Yes, I tried, and after I deleted it. Time lost. Its hardly integrated to WinUAE, because its not, really. For example, things integrated in houses, cars, machines, phones and even computer programs are not only useful, are more fun to use and does the job faster. Before we didnt knew about this, "a phone was only a phone", not more. I am sure you can see the world was far less interesting. Its not a necessity, but even emulators are not a necessity, they are used in the sense that they are more fun, and does the job faster, like a hitech phone. Its only an example, dont take this too severily.

Printer drivers live in memory together with the kernel and always share the CPU/RAM with the DirectX game you are playing. For trashing your computer, building a chain of dependencies with printers, drivers and services, between the programs you use everyday is perfect. Most users that have this point of view are because they had built a chain like this one or more times, and was "destructed" by a virus or Windows/Windows Update bug. Its very hard to manage a situation like this, not because either Windows, or this or that program sucks, but because of the several layers that was destructed by a full day using the computer.

While, in a dialog like this, if you implement it, would exist only on WinUAE, and after a user would quit from WinUAE, it will not exist anymore in memory or CPU.

[Toni Wilen]

No. Also I don't support broken OS installations.

Duplicating OS features makes no sense.

[Leandro Jardim]

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

No. Also I don't support broken OS installations.

This is very evil sarcasm. You know you are not supporting broken OS installations.

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

Duplicating OS features makes no sense.

I dont want to enter in a discussion on a thread that you wish to won, but its not like duplicating OS features. But I know you understood very well that its not the case.

[Toni Wilen]

Actually I have no idea whats the point of this feature because for me it appears to do exact same as using virtual printer driver.

Your comparisons are probably totally invalid because I am 100% sure "other" emulator does it only when emulating compatible printer (I assume usual Epson standard), not when emulated OS runs some native driver. There is no way for UAE to have emulation for each AmigaOS supported printer!

Epson emulation already supports printing to png image.

[Leandro Jardim]

Ah sorry Toni, I am wrong...