The highly retro monochrome laser printer, Samsung ML-1610, continues to work just fine on macOS 10.13 High Sierra. However, getting driver support took me a long time to figure out a while ago. I got something worked out for macOS 10.12 (Sierra) and posted about it here.

To my great surprise, my old post on getting this going has become the most popular, heavily visited post on dawning.ca. So… I’ve revised things and spun this in to what I’m calling “ml1610-blaster”. There’s a github repo hosting it, here: ml1610-blaster.git

How to get ML-1610 working under macOS 10.13 High Sierra

Download

Click here for ml1610-blaster-1.0, as released on github.

Installation Steps

1. Download the release zip: here’s a link.
2. Unzip the release zip somewhere, pay attention where.
3. Run the splix installer. It WILL FAIL. But it seems to succeed enough in some way that matters. (You’ll probably have to go through your Security settings to get the installer to open)
4. Open your System Preferences, go in to Printers and click the plus button to add a new one.
5. Opt to select your own driver and navigate to the unzipped files, pick the ml1610.ppd file.

Historical

Click here to see my older post on how to get this going on macOS 10.12 Sierra. I suspect these newer steps will work entirely on Sierra and probably older releases, but just in case, I’ve given you this link.

Fun/weird/pointless facts

1. The screencast was done on a MacPro5,1 running High Sierra 10.13. (It’s using a MacPro4,1 video card, but is an actual 5,1, not a flashed 4,1)
2. My ML-1610 is accessible to me over Bonjour because my ML-1610 is plugged in to an Airport Express (1st gen). Hence, my machines print to this ancient USB device wirelessly.
3. The Samsung ML-1610 supported Windows 98.
4. It was claimed that the host computer required at least 64MB of memory (My wrist watch has 8x more RAM than that).
5. I’m unsure what year the ML-1610 came out, but it was before 2006.