Spooler Printing with Serial Connections

ZTERM 2000 allows print spoolers on the AMOS host system to print to ZTERM's dot-matrix emulator or directly to the printer port by using a special device driver on the host system. When AMOS needs to send data to the special device driver, the transparent print mode will automatically be enabled and disabled.

Configuring the Serial Spooler

To setup this feature, follow these steps:

ZTP.DVR to DSK0:[1,6]

ZTNULL.TDV to DSK0:[1,6]

ZTP.INI to DSK0:[1,6]

ZTPINI.LIT to DSK0:[1,4]

2.        Decide how many PCs will be using this feature and add a special TRMDEF statement to your INI file for each. The ZTP driver will attach the normal job to these dummy terminals when it is in use. For example:

TRMDEF ZTP1,PSEUDO,ZTNULL,2,2,2

TRMDEF ZTP2,PSEUDO,ZTNULL,2,2,2

Note that the name of the TRMDEF is not important - the PSEUDO interface and ZTNULL terminal driver is used to locate these dummy terminals.

3.        Add the following to the INI file, just after the last DEVTBL statement:

DEVTBL ZTP0

ZTPINI

4.        Add a SYSTEM statement to your INI file to load the ZTP driver into system memory:

SYSTEM ZTP.DVR[1,6]

5.        Now for each spooler, setup the DEVICE statement in the spooler's INI file to point to the ZTP0: device with the name of the real TRMDEF associated with the port. For example:

DEVICE=ZTP0:TERM2

Changing Escape Sequences

Since the ZTP driver uses escape sequences to switch transparent printer mode on and off, you may need to modify the ZTP.INI file. ZTP.INI tells the ZTP driver the name of the terminal driver and the on and off sequences that need to be sent.

This is the standard ZTP.INI file that's distributed with ZTERM 2000:

AM62C=20,0,24,0

AM62A=20,0,24,0

ANSIPC=27,91,53,105,0,27,91,52,105,0

ANSIPG=27,91,53,105,0,27,91,52,105,0

VT100=27,91,53,105,0,27,91,52,105,0

ZTERM=20,0,24,0

ZTERMX=20,0,24,0

The first item is the name of the terminal driver, followed by the decimal values of the characters to enable printer passthrough mode on that particular terminal with a zero byte to terminate the sequence. Following this are the escape sequences required to turn printer passthrough off, again terminated by a zero byte.

If you modify this file, you must restart the system in order for changes to take effect. If you need to verify that the correct escape sequences have been setup for the ZTP driver, type ZTPINI after the system has booted and you'll see a list of terminal drivers and on/off codes.