• I want to thank all the members that have upgraded your accounts. I truly appreciate your support of the site monetarily. Supporting the site keeps this site up and running as a lot of work daily goes on behind the scenes. Click to Support Signs101 ...

Need Help NEW to signmaking, new (OLDDDD) printer/plotter, cant get anywhere, please help!

D

dtsowosso

New Member
Guys, I am completely new to this and I am completely lost.

I picked up a ColorCamm PC-600 for dirt cheap. Yes, I know its ancient. Yes, I know. I know. But for the price, its worth a small struggle of getting it going.

Ok.. so unless theres a trick that I am unaware of, I know these drivers only work on windows xp.

SO, my first step was making an WinXP VM in Virtualbox. Got that working, installed the drivers on LPT1.

FINALLY got Flexi and Production Manager installed, added the device in production manager, sent test print and I get the 'cant open port' message. Here is where I note that the VM host is Windows 10, and the printer is connected using a parallel to usb cable.

Double checking, virtualbox sees the USB cable as 'belkin components', and is sharing the usb device to the VM.

What have I overlooked? Please? Anyone?
 
WildWestDesigns

WildWestDesigns

Active Member
Emulated parallel ports trying to do a USB passthrough don't tend to work in VMs. At best it will be 50/50 in VBox. Having to make sure that you have drivers that work in the VM as well. So you'll need XP drivers, not Win 10 to help your odds, still no promises, but it does help.

I'm a huge fan of VMs, I run four of them (one VM within another VM (no Win 98 support in Vbox, so have to do it that way for that VM)), but it does come with it's limitations.
 
Gino

Gino

Premium Subscriber
According to your profile, you have 2 other functional machines. Why waste time and money on technology that's about 25 years old ??
 
  • Agree
Reactions: Bly
C

creativevinyl

New Member
I used to have a PC600 resin/ribbon printer.
It was quite a good little machine that print and cut.
I would just get an old PC with a parellel port and stick it on the network.
I have an 20 year old Graphtec FC4100 130 that runs on a parralel port, i just got a PCI Card with seial and Parallel ports on it, this seemed to work for me.

I run Flexi 19 on a subscription service so dont need the thousands to purchase it outright. This has the divers for that printer, that may be an option for you, No XP needed then.
 
N

netsol

Active Member
Gino said:
According to your profile, you have 2 other functional machines. Why waste time and money on technology that's about 25 years old ??
Click to expand...

the one thing they still do well is print on styrene, and they don't fade
 
N

netsol

Active Member
wild west,
at our largest client, we have 39 vm's running on 3 hosts in a cisco hyperflex high. availability cluster. (the hyperflex is a horror story, i wish we had stayed with esxi hosts, which was my recommendation)

if you ever need to access usb devices, Digi makes a tcp to usb adapter (the mirror image of what OP needs) , allows sharing a usb device across your network. rock solid devices, i reboot them once a year & forget they exist thecrest of the time
 
WildWestDesigns

WildWestDesigns

Active Member
netsol said:
wild west,
at our largest client, we have 39 vm's running on 3 hosts in a cisco hyperflex high. availability cluster. (the hyperflex is a horror story, i wish we had stayed with esxi hosts, which was my recommendation)
Click to expand...

I'm thinking about updating my main workstation (xeon with 32GB of ECC ram to something a little bit more robust) to handle more VMs (doing a lot more with python, js and electron and I use the VMs for development

netsol said:
if you ever need to access usb devices, Digi makes a tcp to usb adapter (the mirror image of what OP needs) , allows sharing a usb device across your network. rock solid devices, i reboot them once a year & forget they exist thecrest of the time
Click to expand...

Oh now, that's awesome, I'll definitely look into that.
 
N

netsol

Active Member
Gino said:
A PC 600 prints directly to styrene ??
Click to expand...

we were printing to styrene with a citizen printiva and an alps md5000 in 1994, i think

i did some work for the "new" rutgers athletic center that year

this stuff hardly ever fades if you use the clear over coating, try that with your gerber fx
 
Gino

Gino

Premium Subscriber
While what you say might be true, you are not talking about a PC 600. However, thermal printing is very durable, although that machine is still 25 year old technology.
 
N

netsol

Active Member
very true
i have one pc600 we have had for 3 yrs, very troubleome since we replaced main board. recently picked up a pc60 and (2) pc 600's
we don't have space for them anywhere right now (500 sq ft of shop space, my 2 car garage & (4)10' x 10' storage units
on 4/1/2020 we take posession of a 4300 sq ft warehouse

give me 10 days to get situated & i will send you a styrene sign printed on a pc 600 or admit that i was wrong (not something that comes easily to me)
 
N

netsol

Active Member
we are currently laminating 4' x 6' coro panels in borrowed space, can't wait till we have enough space to setup all our toys in one location!
 
Gino

Gino

Premium Subscriber
Let me know. Other than cast or calendered vinyl, you're not gonna get sheets of styrene to go through properly. Even if you could, how will the heating elements be effective ??

My experience with most second guessing of equipment is..... if it could really do it, and do it appropriately, they'd be advertising it as such. Otherwise, it's just something you can do, but isn't a good idea.
 
WildWestDesigns

WildWestDesigns

Active Member
Gino said:
My experience with most second guessing of equipment is..... if it could really do it, and do it appropriately, they'd be advertising it as such. Otherwise, it's just something you can do, but isn't a good idea.
Click to expand...

I think this is why you have some people that Frankenstein hardware/software (well if they are able to do that with software portion) to get it to do things that it may not ordinarily do, or at least advertised as such. Didn't there used to be a user on here from Houston that loved to do that type of stuff, see what boundaries that they could push their hardware?

If right to repair goes the way that it looks like it might, what is going on with tractors and their used market, I could easily see happen with the used market with printers as well. Might see more and more people going with the older tech, Frankensteining it to get away with more.
 
N

netsol

Active Member
regarding right to repair, roland is really pushing it with the new firmwares, making it impossible to getbto service menu, instead of just very difficult

if they want to change the industry to "printing as a service" then they should try marketing that way. i have predicted hp will be the first to try this
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top