georgew@tekig4.UUCP (03/05/87)
1) Hardware: the printer has a 24-pin thermal head. You buy two things:
the printer and an interface card that plugs into the side of the
printer, to give it the Atari character set. The thermal head
works by melting black or colored wax and pressing it onto the paper.
The printing rate is 40 cps in NLQ mode, and is very quiet. It has
tractor feed, but you can hand-feed single sheets, too. The printer is
very small, and only accepts paper up to 10" wide.
2) Software: The manufacturer tells you to just use the Atari SMM804 printer
driver for 1STWORD, and the disk (included with the interface card)
contains some demo pictures and a color screen dump driver that goes in
your AUTO folder (Alt-help prints the screen).
3) Print quality: text is VERY good, since the resolution is up to 160 dpi
in NLQ mode. Screen dumps leave something to desired: although the manual
(and the demo pictures on the disk) indicate the printer is capable of over
100 color shades, the screen dump program doesn't always dither shades
the same as the screen. The colors are bright, but not always correct.
Also, there's no attempt at smoothing: a Neochrome picture prints as
320x200 rectangles.
4) Cost: The printer + interface is a little over $200, but cost per page is
high, due to the single-use ribbons. A page of NLQ text costs about 8 cents,
and a color screen dump about 35 cents.
Overall, it's a nice high-quality printer if you're not doing a large volume of
printing, in which case the ribbon cost kills you.
I have written an OKIMATE.HEX file for 1STWORD with print features not in the
SMM804.HEX file, also including some downloadable characters that I defined
(for printing continuous-line boxed tables, as well as a couple others). I
will email it to anyone who asks for it, and would appreciate any fonts that
anyone else has developed for it.
By the way, 1STWORD's INSTALL.PRG doesn't seem to like lines that have more
than about 42 hex bytes on them. Anybody know a way around this, like a line
continuation character? I have version 0.6 of 1STWORD.
George S. Walker {decvax,ucbvax,...}!tektronix!tekig4!georgew UUCP
Tektronix, Inc. tekig4!georgew@tektronix CSNET
P.O. Box 500, M/S 39-222 tekig4!georgew.tektronix@Udel-Relay ARPANET
Beaverton, OR 97077 503-627-4669