I’ve been rebuilding a #RaspberryPi installation that supports my classic Mac habit 😄
I used to use the awesome #MacIPGW image which includes a ton of pre-configured software like #netatalk. But it hasn’t been updated in a while so I used it as excuse to start from scratch.
I used this Pi Zero W as my starting point. HDMI video stopped working on it for unknown reasons. I added an Ethernet/USB hub hat and a #TashTalk 2 hat for #LocalTalk devices.
A print is initiated from a device to the CUPS-PDF driver on my #netatalk Raspberry Pi.
The resulting PDF is placed in the AFP share of netatalk/afpd.
An emulated PPC Mac 9.2.2 running the #AppleScript below is watching for new files in that folder and will print them using Acrobat Reader to the #ImageWriterII via #LocalTalk using the MacPalette II driver.
It works, but crashes with dialog that I can't auto-dismiss.
Ok, so this centipede printer workflow isn’t really reliable so I dove into CUPS to try and see if there’s a way to alter the dithering.
I tried adding different settings to the PPD file but nothing produced any changes.
Until I added “DitherPPI” (a GS option) and it produced a result that was pretty good! I tried various values (30, 80, 120, 180) but they all looked identical. In any case, this is good enough for me!
As promised, I wrote a blog post about creating my own classic Mac support server using a Raspberry Pi Zero, a TashTalk 2 hat, netatalk, and a few other tools. It's very much like MacIPRpi with everything current.