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I occasionally troll Craigslist locally for old hardware for my collection and for fun. I recently got a top of the line — for the late 90s — Graphtec 24” vinyl
by incanus77 5y ago
I occasionally troll Craigslist locally for old hardware for my collection and for fun. I recently got a top of the line — for the late 90s — Graphtec 24” vinyl cutter/plotter, complete with PowerMac 9500 with CRT and Jaz drive all for 40 bucks. It works great, has Mac OS 9 and Illustrator and everything else that I need for the setup. The owner’s dad ran a sign business until he passed away, then the son used it for hobbies for years. I’d like to modernize it a bit and shrink the Mac out of the equation, but the system just works for now.
- amatecha 5y agoNice, that's a pretty good deal! I just dug up an old Jaz disk myself -- just have to figure out which of my machines (if any) has a drive.. Ahh, the good ol' days ! haha
- BBC-vs-neolibs 5y agoPossibly you could run the full stack with Qemu or https://sheepshaver.cebix.net/ https://sheepshaver.cebix.net/ Might even work fast enough on a Raspberry Pi 4.
- incanus77 5y agoThe comms protocol itself is sending to 25-pin serial at 9600bps, so it’s pretty simple to rig up another way. The stuff sent is just monochrome vector art. I was thinking of either finding or making an open source (maybe Python) lib to talk to the protocol and then yeah, probably running it on a Pi as a service I could send right to from my computer. The plotter is about waist-high, so it’s pretty large. I figured I could velcro a Pi to the underside pretty easily and serve via wifi.