Wow, I'd forgotten how AMAZINGLY SLOW dot matrix printers were when you're trying to print graphics

@foone In school I had a Commodore 1526 printer that had one (1) re-definable character that you could redefine once (1ce) per line and I wrote a printer driver to use it as a graphics device and if I remember correctly it ran at a little under 30 minutes a page, resulting in a blazing two pages per hour

@foone is it waiting to cool off, or is the connection speed just that slow?

@ada good question! Based on the windows print spool it's only sending new data every couple lines, so I think it's cool off?

Though it might just be slowly updating the page

@foone @ada Is it connected via the parallel or serial port? Typically those printers try to squeeze out every millisecond they can from the process, sometimes having buffers of multiple kilobytes to keep the data flowing.

It took 15 minutes to finish the whole page.

Which it printed incorrectly so I have to DO IT AGAIN!

@foone Had the same issue overnight, just in 3D. Annoying!

@casandro @ada parallel. I wanted to use serial (so I could easily do this from a modern machine) but it turns out the serial port is an add-on that I never actually installed, so I'm using parallel from a Windows 98 laptop

@foone @ada OK, then it's likely the printer that's slowing it down.

@foone also that multiple passes per same line is weird on a printer with a normal graphics mode. is the driver having to send subsections of the band?

for a machine calling itself "turbo" it sure is one slow MFer

@foone I'd assumed it'd be impossible to get new ribbons for these old printers, but I guess some of the big brands are still used in commercial settings, and so the consumables are still out there. I think I have an Okidata of some sort in a box, but never tried to use it...I should dig it out and see if I can get ink for it.

@moira I put it on high quality graphics mode, so I think it's double-printing some dots to get extra contrast?

and it is pretty fast when you're printing text!

@foone A long time ago, first year uni, I thought it a good idea to print a report on my Epson 9-pin dot matrix printer.

It had formulas.

It had graphics.

It had bold text.

I had chosen highest print quality.

It. Took. Hours.

to print the bloody thing. And all the while it was making that blood-curdling circular-saw-ripping-through-concrete-tiles sound. While I wanted to go to bed, because hey, hours.

@foone oooh yeah I can see that, those old "near letter quality" dot-matrix printers did a bunch of shenanigans with shit like print-head offsets and double printing in highest quality for line smoothing text modes too

so yeah probably something like that, it's, like, smoothing diagonal lines or something

@foone it's like watching a graphing calculator draw a Mandelbrot set. But louder

@foone sweet nostalgia, so meditative. On the other hand, hellooo #chiptune and #bitpop