Diablo 630 emulation was originally used with daisywheel printers and typewriters. It supports only sequences for tabulation, line and character spacing, attribute selection (bold, double-strike, underline), horizontal movement in both directions, proportional spacing and automatic centering and justification among others. This emulation is sometimes used by other vendors as a base for their printer specific emulation.

Some information can be found in the “Brother Laser Printer HL-Series - Technical Reference Guide“:

hl-series_techreference_revc_oct1994.pdf

The following conventions are used in this description of the Diablo 630 mode software commands:

• A letter, control code, word or number in upright bold text is a literal character and should be sent to the printer as the character code.
• A letter or word in italics is a variable and you must substitute the appropriate value or values when using the command.
• A statement element enclosed in angle brackets < > may be of any size up to some specified maximum.

• The printable area is the area of the page where the printer can place a dot.
• The units of horizontal and vertical movement on the page are the horizontal motion index (HMI) and vertical motion index (VMI). You can set these units as you wish and then move the print position horizontally or vertically in multiples of them.
• The bits that comprise a byte of data are numbered 1 to 8. Bit 1 is the least significant bit (LSB) and bit 8 is the most significant bit (MSB).

Control codes are ASCII codes that instruct the printer to perform a particular operation, such as a line feed. Send a control code to the printer by sending the same type of instruction you would use to print a character using its ASCII code number. For example, the ASCII code for a form feed is 12, so to get the printer to perform a form feed use the following BASIC statement:

LPRINT CHR$(12);

The CHR$ operator is normally used to convert an ASCII code into its corresponding character.

Escape sequences tell the printer the Diablo 630 mode function to perform. An escape sequence consists of the Esc character followed by one or more characters which define the operation to be performed. Send an escape sequence to the printer by sending the same type of instruction you would use to print characters using their ASCII codes. Some escape sequences require parameter values or data following them, for example, commands which turn a particular feature on and off. Numerical parameter data, too, is sent to the printer as if it were a character code to be printed. For example, to move the print position to the third column position on the page the required escape sequence is Esc HT 3. In BASIC this would be:

LPRINT CHR$(27); CHR$(9); CHR$(3);