VA(4) | Device Drivers Manual (vax) | VA(4) |
va
—
va0 at uba0 csr 0164000 vector vaintr
vz0 at va0 drive 0
The Benson-Varian printer/plotter in normally used with the line printer system. This description is designed for those who wish to drive the Benson-Varian directly.
In print mode, the Benson-Varian uses a modified ASCII character set. Most control characters print various non-ASCII graphics such as daggers, sigmas, copyright symbols, etc. Only LF and FF are used as format effectors. LF acts as a newline, advancing to the beginning of the next line, and FF advances to the top of the next page.
In plot mode, the Benson-Varian prints one raster line at a time. An entire raster line of bits (2112 bits = 264 bytes) is sent, and then the Benson-Varian advances to the next raster line.
Note: The Benson-Varian must be sent an even number of bytes. If an odd number is sent, the last byte will be lost. Nulls can be used in print mode to pad to an even number of bytes.
To use the Benson-Varian yourself, you must realize that you cannot open the device, /dev/va0 if there is an daemon active. You can see if there is an active daemon by doing a vax/lpq(1) and seeing if there are any files being printed. Printing should be turned off using vax/lpc(8).
To set the Benson-Varian into plot mode include the file
<sys/vcmd.h>
and use the
following ioctl(2) call
ioctl(fileno(va), VSETSTATE, plotmd);
int plotmd[] = { VPLOT, 0, 0 };
int prtmd[] = { VPRINT, 0, 0 }; ... fflush(va); ioctl(fileno(va), VSETSTATE, prtmd); write(fileno(va), "\f\0", 2);
ENXIO
]EIO
]va
driver appeared in
4.0BSD.
The interface hardware is rumored to have problems which can play havoc with the UNIBUS. We have intermittent minor problems on the UNIBUS where our vax/va(4) lives, but haven't ever been able to pin them down completely.
February 17, 2017 | NetBSD 9.4 |