StyleWriter M8000

[Christopher]

Hey, I've had this StyleWriter under my bed with my IIsi and Performa 400 for while and I'd like to use the printer with my Vista laptop, iMac early 2006, and Quicksilver G4. Which computer would be the easiest to connect to and then share from to the others from there? Last spring I garbage picked it and it still worked with the Performa it came with. Neither mac's have ethernet so I can't just connect to my network easily. I would assume I need an Apple 8-din adapter of some sort. Was there ever a PCI version of what I'm talking about?

I have a newer printer in the closet but, I'd rather have this running since it's 1/4 of the size of my newer printer, and for style.

 

[Gil]

Well the StyleWriters are QuickDraw printers, so even if you get the physical connections working, it will be very difficult if not impossible to print from a non-OS 9 Mac or a PC. I'm not aware of any solutions that would allow you to do this.

 

[register]

There are several ways to connect QuickDraw printers to Ethernet. The easiest way would be to use an Ethernet bridge designed for this purpose, as built from Apple especially for the StyleWriter and from Asante or Farallon. The next easiest way would be to set up another Mac conected locally to the StileWriter and to share the StyleWriter. Both methods have a major drawback: you must have a specific QuickDraw printer driver software installed on any machine that should print on this printer -> NoGo for Windows.

There is at least one other option out there: If you have a Macintosh computer to be used as a print server, something interesting would be possible: use a software Raster Image Processor like TScript. This software runs on a computer locally hooked to the StileWriter and spoofs a virtual PostScript printer to the LocalTalk net. The printer would be connected using the Mac's serial port, while you could run the LocalTalk net using a 10baseT connection. There are still cheap LC-PDS ethernet adaptors available on ebay one could use for the Performa 400. With the Performa 400 you propably would have some performance issues if you wanted to print high resolution greyscale output, however. The Quicksilver (which should have an Ethernet connector but might need some interface card or dongle to provide a serial printer port) would be a good machine to run TScript using some classic Mac OS (7…9).

TScripts provides the by far best output capabilities you can have on a QuickDraw printer, as it properly translates vector graphics to a bitmap for the QuickDraw printer. Unfortunately you have a new challenge when trying this solution on a mixed network environment: run LocalTalk on Windows and find a LaserWriter driver for Windows …

Did some comerade successfully try to connect a Windows machine to a LocalTalk network?