Adapters

Dear Macdoc,

Alongside my re-built Apple G4, and Apple laptop, I have an old AppleMac 4400 in very good working order. I want to keep it running so I can use all my old programmes, early photoshop so on and so forth. And I'm sure I can find spares on Ebay

However, I would like to connect it to a reasonable modern printer, the problem is that the 4400 is SCSI. Is it possible to find an adapter to fit SCSI, with a usb printer.?

Many thanks
Tony Shelley


Hi Tony

To be honest you'll be flogging a dead horse. For a start SCSI is not a printer output. Its mainly used for connecting hard drives and scanners. It's the serial printer port that is used. There is no adapter to convert this port to USB.

Modern USB printers will be more compatible with the modern Macs. You might get away with using an Apple generic printer driver, or an open source CUPS driver (search Google) or at best making a PDF using Adobe Distiller then printing this.

Colour printing is possible over an Ethernet network to a Colour Laser Printer using the Postscript Laser writer driver in System 9, but these printers are more expensive than Inkjet ones.

The cheapest solution for you to find a non USB printer. Sadly we recently chucked a perfectly good Epson Stylus Pro XL Plus A3 printer as we couldn't find a good home for it... non even the charity shops wanted to sell it!

Should have put it on Ebay...