The device has two dip switches dedicated to select one of the 4 printe rmodels. I agree that the difference between them is probably minor and related to some control characters.
I started this thread as I was asked if the test equipment could be used to DOCUMENT measurements, without owning one of the four supported printer models.
Of course I searched eBay for a cheap listing of those printers, but there is none being sold, at least at reasonable prices.
I think I can now say that a solution is possible and it consists in hooking up some form of Arduino and send the decoded bytes from the test equipment over USB/serial port to the PC for further processing/formatting.
I thought that this application would be of general interest, as there is probably a lot of older test equipment in this situation: works fine, but only output is through some old centronics printer.
Now I need to see if the test equipment is indeed purchased and if so, I will look further into this. I keep mentioning Arduino, because I feel confortable in considering I will be able to program it as opposed to some other microcontroller. I am not a low level programmer. Also, I don't think that ther will be any timing issues, as stated before: LPT is as fast as the printer allows.
I remember that those old dot matrix printer would allow some escape sequence, where each byte would be interpreted as a vertical line of 8 pixels (or something like that). This would generate the bitmap graphics. At this point I don't know if the test equipment supports this, but I think I would be able to reconstruct the bitmap with some VB .net programming.
The linked Retro Printer looks spot on, but I just realized that there doesn't seem to be much going on... Last entry of June 2017, before 2015. Probably a dead project, unfortunately. If only they knew that there is another market besides retro computing: test equipment!
Regards,
Vitor