Asante Localtalk Bridge

#1 Wed, 25 Jun 2008 - 20:04

Hey guys, havent tried to get this working for a while. I have an old Personal Laserwriter 320 that I wanted to use with my iMac G3 running 10.4. So i bought an asante localtalk to ethernet bridge. Setup goes like this : Laserwriter - Bridge - Network Hub - iMac. I could never get the iMac to recognise the printer. Any ideas?

#2 Wed, 25 Jun 2008 - 20:16

A simple Google search for "Asante LocalTalk bridge" threw up lots of discussion about this device. I suggest looking at the Amazon and MacIntouch comments as a starter.

#3 Wed, 25 Jun 2008 - 20:34

Setup goes like this : Laserwriter - Bridge - Network Hub - iMac. I could never get the iMac to recognise the printer. Any ideas?

How are you connecting the printer to the asante box? You can't use a serial cable, you must use a pair of local talk connector boxes and appropriate cabling.

Also see http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7078638

#4 Wed, 25 Jun 2008 - 22:43

Make sure you have Appletalk activated on the iMac's ethernet connection. You may need to download something like Gimp Print to get it to work, I think I had to do this in order to get my LaserWriter Select running with OS X but it was so long ago I can't really remember. IIRC, printer setup and support is generally better in 10.4.

Also, the order in which you power on the Mac, printer and bridge can sometimes also affect it. With my setup powering on the bridge (mine is a Dayna EtherPrint) first, then the Mac, then the printer tends to work best. These old Apple printers take a minute to show up on the Mac after they are switched on so bear this in mind.

Good luck!

#5 Thu, 26 Jun 2008 - 00:53

Setup goes like this : Laserwriter - Bridge - Network Hub - iMac. I could never get the iMac to recognise the printer. Any ideas?

Click to expand...

How are you connecting the printer to the asante box? You can't use a serial cable, you must use a pair of local talk connector boxes and appropriate cabling.

Also see http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7078638

Ah yes that could be the problem, will have a look at those on ebay.