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From: fgd3@jc3b21.UUCP (Fabbian G. Dufoe)
Newsgroups: net.micro.amiga
Subject: Re: How to build a parallel cable?
Message-ID: <452@jc3b21.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 7-Sep-86 21:18:14 EDT
Article-I.D.: jc3b21.452
Posted: Sun Sep  7 21:18:14 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 9-Sep-86 21:52:22 EDT
References: <6014@alice.uUCp>
Organization: St. Petersburg Jr. College, St. Petersburg FL
Lines: 33
Summary: I modified an Amiga cable.

In article <6014@alice.uUCp>, d@alice.UUCP writes:
> My query: how do *you* build your parallel cables?
> -- 
> # Daniel Rosenberg  (CE)   @   AT&T Bell Labs, Murray Hill 

I had the problem of connecting my Amiga to a Radio Shack Daisy Wheel II
printer.  I started with a standard Amiga Centronics parallel printer cable.
The Radio Shack printer--like most of theirs--does not send ACK*
on pin 10.  The Amiga sets up the data on pins 2 through 9, then pulls pin
1 low for a moment to signal the printer that it is ok to read the data.
The Amiga waits until pin 10 is pulled low momentarily before sending the
next character.  So it would print one character and wait... and wait...
and wait.

I sought help from my dealer and through them from Commodore.  Nobody could
figure out how to get the high-to-low transition back to the Amiga.  I kept
tinkering and finally tried connecting pin 11 (BUSY) to pin 10.  When the
printer finished printing it pulled BUSY low.  By feeding that same signal
to the Amiga on pin 10 I gave it the transition it was looking for.

The distressing thing about this story is that I know next to nothing about
hardware and I found an answer when the engineers at Commodore (according
to the dealer) couldn't.  I can only believe the problem wasn't
communicated to them clearly--the solution is too simple to have been
beyond their abilities.


Fabbian Dufoe
  350 Ling-A-Mor Terrace South
  St. Petersburg, Florida  33705
  813-823-2350

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