Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!hplabs!hp-pcd!hpvcfs1!neff
From: neff@hpvcfs1.HP.COM (Dave Neff)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: DeskJet Plus speed
Message-ID: <2150007@hpvcfs1.HP.COM>
Date: 1 Jun 89 19:26:47 GMT
References: <8905311606.AA18007@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Organization: Hewlett Packard, Vancouver, WA
Lines: 37

> The question is: is there any method (preferrable in C, but assembler will
> do as well) that allows one to send of characters faster.

> Another question is: What is the time one should expect for printing
> graphics of 300 * (225*8) dots on the deskjet, without any compression
> of transmitted data?
>
>                     frans van hoesel
>
The DeskJet+ will print a page of 300 DPI graphics compressed or otherwise
when using the parallel port in about 1 minute 15 seconds.  I can have a
1 Meg bitmap on an 8 megahertz IBM PC compatable and using the standard
copy program (copy /b) the copy program just barely sends the data fast
enough for the DeskJet+.  When compressions modes are used the PC has no
trouble keeping up with the DeskJet+.

Now the 1 minute 15 second figure does not take into account the time
required by an application to build a page.  Obviously the DeskJet+ has
no control of this and this will generally be the limitting factor.
We tell our software vendors to try to create and dump a page of graphics
in under 2 minutes in order to have "acceptable" performance.  Many
programs on an 8 megahertz IBM compatable have no problem doing
this (i.e. Lotus and others).  If this kind of speed is possible on
an 8 megahertz brain damaged CPU one would thing it could be done on
an 8 megahertz reasonable CPU :-).

I'm not an Atari user so I don't know the fastest way to shove out
bytes on an Atari.  I have had contact with some Atari users that have
dumped out uncompressed bitmaps from their Atari to the DeskJet+
in about 1 minute 30 seconds but I don't know how they were using
it.  I would guess the fastest way of course is to bypass the OS and
ROM and write to the parallel IO port, but I don't believe the MS-DOS
copy program does this (I would assume it does a DOS file open on
both the source and the destination then does reads and writes).

Dave Neff
hplabs!hpvcfs1!neff