I work in IT, so seeing a custom firmware on a printer with a custom application running on the printer serial board does probably make sense if you’ve got the capital to pull something like that off.  Imagine forcing a printer to always communicate exactly how you want/intend it to.  It has to make the support side of things fairly easy.  No chance for a user and/or hacker to change that.  But from a strictly personal and selfish perspective, I just add this to the long, long list of things that I dislike about Bank of America.  🙂

Anyway, I’ve decided now that the jumper switches are in-place and I’ve confirmed that serial communication to the printer is working at 2400 baud (albeit from a PC), it’s time to move to the Commodore.

After a few quick tests, things weren’t working.  Again.  Grrreeeeeaaaat.

My program won’t work.  I move to using a “real” terminal program, specifically NovaTerm.  Messing around with it, can’t get it going.  Change my cabling to use a(n additional) null-modem adapter and it starts working!!  Switch back to my BASIC program and the success continues!

I then started messing with creating code using the ESC/POS command set to control the printer on a bit deeper level than just sending text to it and have had pretty decent success so far.

More to follow soon!