As a kid, how would I ever have imagined one day owning a color laser printer? They costed a fortune back then – way more than I could afford. I paid less than 400 DKR for this full-blown Lexmark CS410n color laser printer, brand new. Too good a price to not just buy it and make an old dream come true.
Unfortunately Lexmark is not the most supported brand on the Amiga, neither with the latest provided printer drivers, or in third party software such as Turbo Print or good old Studio by Wolf Faust.
However, just for the fun of it, I made my color laser print – and although there are several solutions, the most easy one was actually Olaf Bartels lpr-dev from Aminet:
https://ftp.uni-erlangen.de/aminet/comm/tcp/lpr-dev.lha
Following the provided doc, it is fairly simple:
Copy OpenDevicePatch to C:
Copy lpr.device to devs:
Insert in s:user-startup:
RUN >NIL: OpenDevicePatch FROM parallel.device TO lpr.device
Create a file in envarc: named lpr.device and in my case with this single line:
HOST=172.16.1.3 DIR=hd7: QUEUE=AMIGA RAW
(Host IP address is the IP of my Lexmark, hd7: is a drive where it throws a printer spool file if needed, AMIGA is the name of the printer cue – and RAW is the key point here, since that makes it send the data as postscript, so that the Lexmark can understand it.
NOTE:
When you print in some programs which have their own printer manager included such as WordWorth, Pagestream etc. select print method as PostScript when the Print Setup/Settings menu pop up. The driver I am using is still the Generic one from Workbench; I tried playing with others, but the Generic one seems to provide the best result. It is quite fine for vector graphics, however, not really fine tuned for any bitmap graphics due to the fact that there are no updated and optimized Lexmark driver.