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From: Marko_Mäkelä
Date: 2001-06-23
Subject: RE: Plus/4 Parallel Cable and Software

On 23 Jun 2001 svs_fire@inwind.it wrote:

> Beware: if you own a recent PC with integrated LPT port, and if
> you want to buy the X1541 cable (with cheaper price) , then you
> can have problems.

I understood that Eric was looking for a Centronics cable for the plus/4,
that he could use for connecting his plus/4 to a printer. The X1541 cable lets you to connect a Commodore serial bus disk drive to an IBM PC compatible.

Connecting the printer is straightforward for the data lines, but there is some choice for the handshaking lines. On the printer side, you strictly need STROBE (plus/4 signals that a new data byte is ready) and ACK
(printer acknowledges the reception of the data). The BUSY output from the printer does not need to be connected, and neither needs the INIT input to printer (which acts like the RESET line on the Commodore side).

If there already is a "standard" for Centronics printers on the plus/4
that you want to conform to, you need to find out how the handshaking lines are connected on the plus/4 side. You don't need the schematics for that; just have a look at the machine code of a printer driver.

Marko