Help! Serial Printer Data display/emulation

Hello all,

I am looking for a little help. I am involved with emergency services
in my county, and the county uses Old Okidata ML320 serial printers to
send Dispatch Reports to the fire/EMS stations. Basically what is
happening is that there is a 9600 baud modem in each station that is
dialed into when there is a call. This modems serial port is plugged
directly into the serial port on the back of the Okidata printer. So
for simplicity (Telephone line -- 9600 baud modem -- Serial Okidata
Printer) The printer prints out the data. The goal is to remove this
old Okidata printer, run the modem into the serial port on PC then
monitor the data on the PC, and print the data on out choice of a
printer. I am looking at the program called Comcap. This would monitor
the serial data, display it, and redirect to a printer. I fear that
this is not that simple however. What type of data is in the serial
stream coming out of the modem and being fed directly into the Okidata
printer? Is it ASCII, Plaintext, or something else?

I have also seen the program called PrintCapture. I am curious if this
might be the solution that I am looking for. I have not seen any talk
of it decoding data that comes out of modems though, and not knowing
what kind of data goes into a serial print, I am stuck with making my
next move.

Many thanks in advance for the help,

Steve

On Fri, 18 Mar 2011 08:28:43 -0700, Steve Castellano wrote:

simple however. What type of data is in the serial stream coming out of
the modem and being fed directly into the Okidata printer? Is it ASCII,
Plaintext, or something else?

An educated guess -- don't bet the farm on this...
Most likely straight ASCII, the same characters that
appear on the printer, with line feeds and C/R's, maybe tabs. Conceivably
some embedded escape codes that are specific to the printer, but I'd bet
not.

Google to see if you can find a manual for the printer model to read what
it accepts.

On 3/18/2011 12:08 PM, default wrote:
On Fri, 18 Mar 2011 08:28:43 -0700, Steve Castellano wrote:

simple however. What type of data is in the serial stream coming out of
the modem and being fed directly into the Okidata printer? Is it ASCII,
Plaintext, or something else?

An educated guess -- don't bet the farm on this...
Most likely straight ASCII, the same characters that
appear on the printer, with line feeds and C/R's, maybe tabs. Conceivably
some embedded escape codes that are specific to the printer, but I'd bet
not.

Google to see if you can find a manual for the printer model to read what
it accepts.
There might be switches on the printer that specify what sort of text it
expects, ASCII, OKIdata specific, Epson something or other ,etc.

You probably have a terminal emulation on your computer already -
Hyperterminal was often included in the Windows software. Connect the
modem to your PC, run Hyperterminal, and look at the data on screen.

Thanks,

I will hook it up and see what happens. Im hoping it is just ASCII
data. If it is I will need to figure out some way of getting the raw
data to emulate into something that prints onscreen properly. One step
at a time I guess... Thanks for the quick replies.