Canon BJC-85 no longer works in Classic

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Level 1

130 points

Canon BJC-85 no longer works in Classic

Client has three Macs, latest an iBook G4 that came with Tiger installed. He has a Canon BJC-85 printer, which he uses to print artwork he creates with an old Broderbund app in Classic. The printer works fine on his OS 9 and 10.3 machines, but in Tiger it displays error "D203" (nonspecific system error) in conjunction with Mac error -43 (file not found).

He brought his machine to a local shop, and they managed to doink around with it such that it would print from Classic, but couldn't print in any other situation. He had them reverse it.

He's discussed his problem with AppleCare, and someone there told him that "Tiger handles printers within Classic differently from earlier OS X releases -- it tries to divert the job to the OS X driver instead." I'm not aware of anything like this, and I don't see any discussions of this issue anywhere on the web.

If this is some kind of Tiger issue with no workaround, I don't even want to get his hopes up. Can anybody shed some illumination on this?

Powerbook G4 (& Lombard, Wallstreet, iBook...), Mac OS X (10.3.9)

Posted on Nov 18, 2005 1:08 PM

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Answer 1

a brody

Level 10

83,347 points

Nov 18, 2005 1:35 PM in response to C. D. Tavares

This article may help:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.4/en/mh660.html

Note, since I don't have that Canon I can't say for sure.

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Answer 2

C. D. Tavares Author

Level 1

130 points

Nov 19, 2005 4:52 PM in response to a brody

That certainly resembles the discussion my client said he had with Apple.

I have asked him to try those steps, and will mark this problem as solved if it works for him. Thanks so much for the help!

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Answer 3

C. D. Tavares Author

Level 1

130 points

Nov 23, 2005 1:45 AM in response to C. D. Tavares

The client elaborates:

I read that Apple Tech Note about printing from OS 9 applications.

I can print from my several month old iBook to my BJC-85 from OS X native applications (Excel and Appleworks)

If I open a document in Broderbund "BannerMania" in Classic, go to the Chooser, select LaserWriter 8, close Chooser, File > Print, I get a message "This printer cannot print because this application is not AppleEvent aware and you have not installed Desktop Print 2.0 software."

If I open a document in "BannerMania" in Classic, go to the Chooser, select BJC-85, close Chooser, File > Print, I get a sign "BJC-85 Error number:D203 System error -42. Job canceled."

If I open a document in "BannerMania" in Classic, go to the Chooser, select BJC-80, close Chooser, File > Print, I can print the document on my BJC-85.

The driver BJC-80 is one from an old (maybe ten years) program called PowerPrint which came with a cable and a bunch of drivers for various printers to let you print to a parallel printer (BJC-80) from a Mac of that time which had a serial printer port. Subsequently I got a later version of PowerPrint which also came with a cable and a bunch of printer drivers for printing to a parallel printer (BJC-80) from a Power Book with a USB port.

What I don't understand is now that I have a BJC-85 with a USB input, why can't I print to the BJC-85 using the driver I downloaded from Canon for that printer, or using the LaserWriter8 "driver" to print to my OS X printer (BJC-85) as Apple says I ought to be able to do. I have three working Macs (an iBook, a G4 iMac running OS 10.3, and a newer iBook running OS 10.4) and I would really like to be able to use the BJC-85, as well as other printers, with any of them without pulling my hair out each time I need to switch printers.

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Answer 4

KOENIG Yvan

Level 8

41,807 points

Nov 23, 2005 9:07 AM in response to C. D. Tavares

Hello

PERHAPS this tip may help.

There is a file whose pathname is:

"Macintosh HD:Users:yourUserAccount:Library:Preferences:ByHost:com.apple.Classic.000a95ba8 7aa.plist"
In fact the name is different from a machine thru an other one. Only the beginning "com.apple.Classic." is stable enough.

I discovered that trashing this preferences file gave me the ability to use some features which were lost for some odd reason (AppleWorks 5 was unable to save docs for instance).

It MAY be a workaround to solve your client's problem.

Of course, after trashing it (when Classic is not running), you will have to reset some preferences but, it's not a high cost if all works OK after that.

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE mercredi 23 novembre 2005 18:05:54)

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Answer 5

C. D. Tavares Author

Level 1

130 points

Dec 8, 2005 5:19 PM in response to C. D. Tavares

The conclusion I reached was that neither Canon driver for the BJC-85 works worth squat in Tiger.

I completely deinstalled all Epson software from his machine, then following Epson's recommendation to install the oldest driver first, I attempted to install the Classic driver.

These attempts resulted in a bogus error message about a pre-existing folder “BJ Extras” at root volume. (You can observe the driver creating and then deleting this folder itself while performing the installation.) Canon technician could not solve the problem. I determined that the driver would install fine under Panther, so I booted the machine from a Panther portable drive and did the installation, which then ran the printer fine under Classic in Tiger.

The OS X printer driver for the BJC-85 did not work, either. It installed with no error messages. Print jobs were successfully queued and picked up for processing, then the printer stopped all jobs with no error message. Restarting the job resulted in same behavior. I redefined the printer to use the GIMP driver, and it worked fine -- however it lost the ability to run the Canon maintenance utility. I ended up defining the printer twice -- once under GIMP to print data, and once under the Canon driver just to allow the user to run his head cleaning and test printing utilities.

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