Thanks for reviving some old memories and for spotlighting this product I designed long ago. Amazingly, TH-cam suggested this video for me (I do watch some retro tech videos, so...) The FLICKINGER easter egg was just a joke -- didn't really do anything else. I looked in the original source (yes, I still have it) and the only other undocumented commands were: "*6" which forced a trap (for testing) "/" which printed the current state of all the zero page variables (for debugging purposes) "ZP"+CHR$(address)+CHR$(data) which permitted modification of one of these variables (at specified address), setting it to the data value provided. Again for debugging purposes The funny thing about hiding easter eggs in the command channel (in mostly ASCII) is that occasionally someone from Xetec's call support dept. would come tell me that a customer called in and said that he accidentally printed a bunch of text to the command channel and something odd printed out -- a mysterious phrase or even a bitmap of a girl's face (my girlfriend at the time). No, that was in another product. Yes, I regularly included easter eggs in nearly every product I designed. Didn't have peer code reviews back then so it was easy to slip in just about anything (that would fit in the ROM).
Fantastic, I'm really glad you found the video! Excellent work with the Gold and all your products, and thanks for sharing the extra undocumented commands. Since I'm new to the 6303 instruction set it's a lot slower for me to decipher it than 6502. Those other easter eggs sound fantastic, if you've got hints you're willing to share, let me know :)
@@8_Bit I remember the HD6303 was great in that it had a lot of I/O and integrated timers and the ability to address a large external memory space. So it had a ton of ROM code space (for the day). Was an expensive part, IIRC, so we didn't use it in the lower cost products
@@thebush6077 Celery, this kind of stuff is still used. I support 2400 and 4800 baud dial-up modems on RS-232 for sprinkler systems. There's a whole slew of computer equipment that has not , nor will ever be, updated.
Wow, you’re THE guy...you wrote the program Fontmaster II. I love that program! Granted, I haven’t used it in many years, but back when my C64 was my primary computer for word processing and such, I loved the variety of fonts and the ability to make new ones. I also love the variety of text effects and formatting that it can do. With no manual and no internet back then, I had to try all the key combinations to find out what the controls were, and wrote my own manual for it. Excellent program and very well done!
The translation of "L'amour est bien plus fort que nous" is "Love is stronger than us" or "Love is stronger than we are". Which makes a lot more sense than "Love is stronger far than we" ;) Source : Me, I speak French Nice video :)
@@FadkinsDiet bien = beaucoup in this context. plus = more, bien plus = much more. So a more accurate translation would be 'love is much stronger than we are' .
I agree it's an awkward translation, but it's apparently the chosen English translation of the song title. Here's the song: th-cam.com/video/0hx-f01M1s0/w-d-xo.html
Laser printers, unlike the dot matrix ones, need to fill a whole page or receive an "end of page" character (a.k.a. "Form Feed" in text/ascii mode) before they start printing anything. Otherwise, they sit there indefinitely waiting for more content.
I'll have to experiment more. I'm pretty sure at one point I did try sending form feeds, and in another version I made an infinite loop that kept printing text to the printer and left it for several minutes, with no success. I just looked, and I show that program at 7:48 though I had commented the GOTO at line 100 out again.
@@8_Bit I happen to have a similar printer. I can confirm that it does not print raw text until you send FormFeed code (HEX: 0C) to it. I never tried feeding it a bunch of text for auto-pagination - that may be configurable in printer's settings (the LCD menus). If the printer displays an error after a few minutes of input - this is a good indication that it may have run out of memory without recieving a FF. To test this try printing from DOS (not command window, actual DOS). Or install some generic dumb lineprinter driver - does not have to be HP and then print from command windows (echo Hello>LPT1 etc) The interface converter may also send centronics port signals that confuse the printer or it may not expect the printer to constantly be "ready" or something like that. A lot could have gone wrong and it's not very easy to diagnose. A logic analyzer could help. It is possible that the device needs a specific combination of DIP switches to work with newer printers - although it seems unlikely, more likely it won't ever work with those.
I may be remember incorrectly but I seem to recall my Okimate not automatically ending a print with Form Feed/Carriage Return. This was 25 or so years ago so I could be remembering wrong.
I used to have a crapton of Commodore stuff which I donated to the local children's museum, and was dismayed to learn that it just went into storage instead of being used in their computing exhibit. Later I rebuilt my collection when it was cheap (like $20 for a C64 from a thrift shop) and then ended up long-term lending it to a friend who wanted to teach his kid how to program... and then it just ended up in *his* storage unit, and I ended up losing touch with him.
Sometimes, late at night, I will remember that time I tossed away this or that computer or part. It will make me physically cringe with sadness and regret. Other times I have bought back the same item I tossed away from eBay.
@@christopher88719 I get this watching a lot of these videos where they say how much they just paid for this vintage part etc and I think "I had 2 of those but binned them" 🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️
@@guru332 Long gone sadly!! Parents sold that at a garage sale and that was after I stored it at their house for many years... I was pretty sad when I found out. Luckily I've replaced pretty much everything I ever had and more! You still have your 3000 and CD32?
@@adriansdigitalbasement Yep. Still have my CD32 and A3000. I've also picked up a C128D and a few other commodore computers along the way. I fired up my A3000 last year and found an old pic of all of us from college! I sent a copy to Scott.
@@adriansdigitalbasement I lost all of my 8bit stuff to the destruction of my home 10yrs ago. Now I cannot afford to replace it thanks to being disabled. I owned C64s, 128s (no D models) a dozen or so 1541,1571,and 81 drives (mixed), An Amiga 2000, Atari 800XL along with a 1050 drive (my second computer I ever owned - my first was a Timex/Sinclair 1000)... and a crapton of original boxed software for the C64 (my favorites were the gold box set of D&D titles from SSI of which I had all of them), and an assortment of original boxed Atari software as well. I also had a couple of monitors, and ALOT of original magazines from the period (Compute!, Compute's Gazette, ANTIC, etc). I damn near cry every time I think about what I lost. I am not even going to go into the Vinyl I lost.
I threw out a wall of Mac SEs and SE30s, baskets loaded with AT and XT cards, piles of 386 and 486 machines, mountains of Commodore stuff, Mac clones, the works when I was in my teens. Everything was pristine and working.Total investment was maybe 200 bucks at the time. These days the decimal point would move to the right at least once. Whoops.
I remember those days. I turned in a report printed on rolled fax paper with a thermal printer, each page cut to a different length, and written on Speedscript when I didn’t know anything about formatting or line wrap. I got marked down because it looked like total shit!
TH-cam recommendations strikes again! Honestly didn’t think I would watch more than a few mins of this and would be doing a lot of fast forwarding. I ended up watching the whole video! Great content, keep it up! You earned a sub today!
If they used a 5V wall-wart, the voltage drop across the small gauge conductors might become significant. With a 9V PS, even if you drop 0.5V each way, you'll still have 8V which is enough to get a solid 5V out of the regulator.
@ungratefulmetalpansy this! I sometimes have to write how to or small manual and this is a task as big as doing the device described. Even having today's tools available
I tried doing that once, but in text mode my printer interface put too big a gap between the lines. I bet the super graphix gold could do it with the right dip switch setting though.
Hahaha! I've been watching Robin's vids now for a couple of weeks straight. I think my wife is getting annoyed. She recently asked if I was still watching the "instructional hand videos"! :rofl:
Those printers were a walk down memory lane. My first job in the mid-80s as a teenager was at a mom and pop Commodore shop. I remember the ads (probably from Compute!) for the Super Graphix Gold but don't think I ever used one.
Three year old video, but worth mentioning: Although the 70s and 80s electronics operated at 4.7 vdc with TTL ICs, or 3.2 vdc with MOS, the stepper motors used in these old printers worked most effectively at 9 vdc. The board in the device usually included a 7805 - 5volt regulator (17:07 just left of the RAM IC) to power the ICs. The Commodore 64 had a 9 *vac* input from the brick power supply along with it's rectified 5vdc. The 9 vac was stepped up to 12 volts and used in the audio/video outputs; the 9 vac is sent through to the RS-232 connector and also used as a 60hz timing standard for the CIA. The idea of using a 9 volt input was to supply more voltage than the regulated voltage that the ICs needed to insure the voltage level wouldn't drop below 4.7 volts when all chips and components were pulling maximum power.
I have just scored the Everything 64 after 35 years of searching, saving and accumulating, saving from Australian Bushfires, and so much more. I am chuffed to see this, but my Commodore MPS printer probably won’t play along. The WD-40 nugget helps, Thank You! Where on earth does one find “Tractor Feed” paper now? Common as a tennis ball in 1990, now we re-powder our cartridges and paper grows on trees! I literally saw 2 pallets of boxes of paper outside the shop selling face masks for $20ea today. A face mask is currently worth more than a box of reams of paper!
The Jumpers for the power can be used to operate the interface without the power supply. Centronics has a +5V pin, some printers provide +5V on this pin for interfaces like this. I can't remember the specs any more but I think it was rated for 100 or 150mA which is not a lot depending on what the interface does!
The current capability would depend entirely on the power supply in the printer. It probably already has a 5V output for the printer logic. It could supply an additional 100mA or more easily.
@@simontay4851 There needs to be a standard so the printer manufacturer knows how much current the printer has at least to provide and the interface manufacturer knows how much current may be taken without damaging the printer.It is a very low current, I often had struggled keeping the current within the specified limit. A simple 7805 voltage regulator is 1A. If the printer needs 800mA for itself and someone draws more than 200mA out of the port, the electronics inside the printer will brown-out! Current limiters as common today (USB) were not possible in the 1980s - at least not economic!
I'm a big fan of your channel and your predilection for the process instead of the destination. Anyway I saw this video and you mentioned that you couldn't get that HP printer to work with your Commodore 64, in spite of your best efforts. I think you're right around my age ( I'm 52), and quite frankly I'm surprised you didn't know right away what the problem was, especially when you could get it to work with your laptop. Back in the late 90s, there was a trend towards using software in the form of drivers to do what should have been done in hardware. I'm talking about softmodems, more commonly known as Winmodems, because they only worked with Windows 95/98 to do the modulation and demodulation. Printers followed the same trend. HP was notorious for this kind of thing and other companies followed suit. Winprinters required a "firmware upload" at print time and only the Windows drivers could accomplish this. That's why, in spite of you learning the JPL printer language, you couldn't get the printer to work. Winmodems were the most prevalent but printers did the same thing. It was, in my opinion, a disgusting way to cut costs, because they didn't have to invest engineering efforts into developing the hardware for either the printers or the modems and instead put the impetus on the software development team to do the job instead. You won't find much about this period of computing online and I suspect it's primarily due to the nauseating nature of the cost-cutting at every opportunity that was going on in the late 90s. Just something I wanted to share with you in case others were unaware of the shenanigans involved with the printer. Keep up the good work and keep those videos coming! They're awesome!
Hey! That LaserJet 2300 is the exact printer that I still use! It's an awesome printer. Mine is the 2300dn, which has the duplex unit. It also has the ethernet card, and someone fitted mine with the maximum amount of RAM it can take (I can't remember what that is -- I think 192MB? Which is pretty huge for the time it was made, but it really is an office printer). It prints incredibly well and the toner is not expensive. Mine needs a little bit of maintenance work, but I won't be giving it up any time soon.
mps801 from memory printed at 50cps, tractor feed paper only, and uni-directonal printing - (it actually used a clock spring to return the head to rest postion.)
I had that KXP-1124 back in 1988-1992 and loved it. I never did a 9 pin as I used a thermal from Brother and went to the KXP 24 pin and it was a wonderful printer.
I owned this one back in the day, I had it attached to a daisy wheel printer, so I could word process and get high quality output to hand in for my grade 12 essays. Half way through first year University I upgraded to a DOS PC with a hard disk and WordPerfect for DOS, for my essays, as I was not happy with the capabilities of my Commodore for essay writing. Thinking back, I can still hear that rata-tata-tatta sound that my old daisy wheel printer made.
I totally forgot the Panasonic Printers! But suddenly your video caused a WHOAH in my brain. I had one of these! Although 24 pin printer, it might have been a KX-P1123? I think that was mine. But I might be wrong. Fascinating how memories get lost, but are still buried. You just need the right tickle.
What a stunning video! This took me back in time as well. Just love when you show all the printers. That was sure a trip down the memory lane. Then the sparkle came when you show that "Panasonic KX-P1124", MMP printer! I used to have one of them for a long time. Totally loved it. Now, I must get one again! Thanks for another great video :)
One thing to be careful with on the WD40 trick - if the ribbon cassette has rubber wheels inside, WD40 will make them swell and not work properly. It works best for ribbons that dried out while sitting, not from being used up. I found the effect isn't long lasting on Apple Imagewriter ribbons, I ended up re-inking them with stamp pad ink... a messy job for sure!
I completely understand :( I've got a list of things that I got rid of and regret, and once in a while I re-find that stuff on eBay when I can afford it.
0:01 I had a Super Grafix Jr. I don't suppose that has the Easter Egg. 3:31 Printer = 4, 5 and Disk = 8+ leaves devices 6 and 7 unaccounted for. 4:12 $416 1990 CAD = $727 2020 CAD. 5:05 I had a 1525 printer as well. That thing was freaking loud! 8:24 24 pins - luxury! 10:03 If it has a 5V regulator, does that mean any voltage above 5V can be used with it? Why wouldn't they supply a 6V adapter and produce less heat? 14:47 "pR" = "PRINT#" is probably why they added the "?" abbreviation for "PRINT". The tokens have to match the longest keyword string. 16:22 Looks like the Hitachi 6303 is a 6809-compatible microcontroller with 256 bytes of RAM, 24 parallel I/O lines, timers, and an asynchronous-serial interface. 18:24 The 6809 instruction set is significantly more powerful than the 6502's. 16-bit index registers, 16-bit stack pointer, 8/16-bit accumulator, 16-bit operations. The 6502 was a reduced derivative of the 6809. 20:10 It could have said, "Greetings, Professor Falken".
As far as I know, the Super Graphix Jr. doesn't have any easter eggs - though I haven't looked! I assume it's more cramped for space in the ROM, anyway. Yeah, that MC7805C regulator can handle up to 18V I think. No idea why they went with a 9V supply though. Finding 16-bit addresses when disassembling the 6303 code was a breeze as they were never split apart like 6502 code is, with LDA #lowbyte : STA somewhere : LDA #highbyte : STA somewhere+1.
? was added as an alias for PRINT in 8K Altair BASIC, which didn't have PRINT# and didn't support upper/lowercase characters. Abbreviations with shifted characters seem to appear first in 6502 BASIC Microsoft did for PET and they seem to exist only on Commodore. Notably, 6502 MS BASIC for Atari and Z80 MS BASICs on PC-88 and MSX are case insensitive and shifted abbreviations do not work (but ? obviously does).
7805 Regulators can handle between 7 and 21 volts, and then outputs it as 5, but it's preferable to be on the lower end because it has to sink more power as heat otherwise. Thus a 6 volt power supply wouldn't function. They probably went for a 9 volt power supply as those were far more common back then. Also the 6502 came out before the 6809, but they're both related to the 6800 in different ways.
@@makomk Yep, I was going to say that too. To anyone reading this, you should be aware that any voltage above that will be converted to heat, so it's best to keep the difference between input and output as low as possible.
Great video! I had 2 Commodore printers, the 801 and the 803 and unfortunately I got rid of them. However, I still have my Star Micronix SG10 printer that I bought new back in the day. The great thing about it, and the reason I bought it, is that it uses just a simple typewriter ribbon on a spool which you can still find easily today. I also have two centronics printer interfaces, the one I used is a Cardco and I can't remember the other one that was given to me. When I got my first inkjet printer, a Canon BJ10e, I remember hooking up my C128 to it through the Cardco and using Epson settings, printing text on a word processor, probably Timeworks Wordwriter, from the C128 to the Canon. But I was quite busy with work and raising two kids and never fully played around with it and at some point I got rid of the Canon printer so I can't play around with it today. Maybe that would be an idea for a future video for you to do!
I love the ink ribbon hack, I got an old Imagewriter 2 not long ago, unfortunately both ink ribbons were not only dried out but the ribbon broke as soon as I tried winding it!
I spent 25 yrs as a reseller, and remembering all the "useless" equipment we threw out, makes me cringe. I always enjoyed the sound of dot matrix printers "singing",
Garth Howe As a kid, it boggled me that a machine that sounded like it was ripping up metal was just printing stuff. Then in 1992 I saw mainframes THROWING wide blue & white tractor feed in the air and changing tapes over for a reason I never understood, then running back to the print room to change out the tractor feed paper so that the mainframe could zing it through and throw it in the air again. At this juncture of my life I decided I didn’t want to be a mainframe operator.
Actually. Matrix printers can quote on quote sing. Look up. Matrix Foreigner music here on TH-cam You'll see what I'm talking about. Note it's just instrumental not voice.
Your French is perfectly fine. As of the sentence, I believe it is a pun on the more common saying "l'amour est plus fort que tout" (loosely, "love conquers all") where "tout" is swapped with the rhyming "nous" (us).
Another fascinating video! I believe there are GEOS drivers for the Lasermate, uncertain if they are straight Centronics or GeoCable specific. And the circuit board inside that interface is very cleanly laid out, the labelling is very well done. Certainly seems they intended to make it easy if anyone wanted to apply the modifications.
One of my first commercial products in the early 80's was print buffers for Apple II, and Commodore PETS. They had a huge 16k buffer! with Centronics or IEEE options. Love the dotmatrix sound.
Speaking of dot matrix sound and dot matrix printers. I used to play a game I can't remember if it was on my own PC or friends!? But this is the back-in-the-day would not home PCS have sound cards back in the day. Nowadays seems like everything is on the motherboard! But on that game the printer was used in several different ways. For some time things it would ask you to have your printer active it would do this anytime before kind of redundant if you would just have the printer runny I'd say. For example when you were doing certain things you would get printouts of various things in the game. You could even have it print out your password 4 levels as well. But there were all sorts of functions in the game that would actually use it almost like a terminal in-game. The other thing is going back to sound. Of course it could use PC speaker but something very clever that it did it use the printer to produce music it was not exactly in tune and everything but it was pretty interesting that was able to do this just in a game. I cannot recall for the life of me what this was called or even how it played out it's just so foggy in my mind but just remember it using a printer for a lot of things. Why understand it was pretty obscure and very few people knew about it. I won't fight was novelty it forces something that was being spirit with but who knows! Of course this was nowhere near the quality of those videos are on TH-cam where a printer is used to produce music since that was done specifically to do things like this and evening as in tweaking to get things just right to produce musical tones so of course that was just hammering out quite literally on the printhead to produce music in the game I could have sworn that it it didn't even sound almost like speech in a couple places but I could be mistaken
The Commodore MPS801-a true NLQ printer: the smudges it made on the paper nearly looked like letters. And the return spring! Woo hoo! Bringin' back the memories!
Dammit. I thought the WD-40 trick was something only *I* did way, way back. I used to split the cartridge open and spray the whole ribbon at once without the straw. Worked great! Thanks for the nice memory!
I had one. It was an okay printer. But the styling didn't really fit in with the rest of the range. It was made by a subsiduary of Seiko which might explain that.
@Jimbaloidatron They look similar because both printers were in fact manufatured by Seikosha, a subsidiary of the Seiko watch maker. The mechanism is probably identical, only the outer plastic shell was styled differently to be in line with Atari's and Commodore's products, respectively. The MPS801, at least, was also sold under the Tandy name, as well as by Seikosha itself. Sources: www.atarimuseum.com/computers/8BITS/XL/xlperipherals/1029.html www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/MPS-801
@@BertGrink Makes complete sense, as they use the same ribbon! They'd have needed to add the appropriate bus interface smarts, so a little more work was needed.
@@Jimbaloidatron The bus interface is most likely just an interchangeable plug-in module, much in the same way that some of Commodore's bigger printers had: the MPS1200 with the 6-pin-DIN IEC interface, and the MPS1250 with a standard Centronics interface (both were, as far as I know, made by Olivetti). A third model, the MPS1230 ( _definitely_ made by Olivetti) had both types of interface.
Press the little button at the rear of that ribbon, where it is marked with the small arrow, and this presses the ink roller to get the ink in the inner sections out to transfer to the ribbon.
That bi-directional printing was a neat optimization that printer manufacturers started making; much faster printing with no extra hardware needed (as long as the firmware improvements could fit in the allotted ROM and RAM).
I had a printer which did this although it tended to cause *slight* differences in alignment depending on whether it printed forwards or backwards, meaning that a vertical line would look very bumpy. It was fine for rough drafts or if you're not doing graphics or boxes.
They weren't so accurate when doing that, though, so you wouldn't use it for something that needed to look really snazzy. Fine for rough drafts, however. I'm pretty sure my Epson LX-400 printer was bi-directional too.
Jesse Carlton Practically all dot matrix (and inkjet and daisy-wheel) printers in the PC era have supported bidirectional printing, with the quality caveats others already mentioned. It’s bizarre that your company didn’t have their report print job set up to use it, since I assume that wasn’t a quality-critical application!
Old Epson dot matrix printer had easteregg commands. I stumbled over some in the 90th writing a specialized printer driver to repurposed the printer as a scanner.
Hello there! I have one of these printer interfaces. I remember setting Epson compatibility mode on my NX-1000. (Hopefully, I'm remembering correctly.) I wouldn't think the interface would ever work with a laser printer, because you cannot set the laser printers to IBM Proprinter or Epson emulation. I had forgotten about the FF required for the laser printer to kick anything out. Thanks for making this video. I remember using GEOS with Japanese fonts to print out my homework. I also got rid of the AC Adapter almost immediately, once I learned the device can pull power the interface connection.
Great Video - Loved the Journey. I also regret all of the old equipment that I donated and trashed over the years. I couldn't wait to move to Ink Jet printers from my old dot matrix printers. I've only got one old Commodore printer and the Vic plotter left. As someone that still uses dot matrix printers at work everyday, I wish we could use the WD-40 trick, but all of our Hazardous Chemicals have to be called out specifically in Tech data to be allowed. Xetec was a great company; loved their Commodore and Amiga products.
The ink in the ribbon also lubricates the printer head. I have seen stickers in printers that tell you not to print without a ribbon and replace the ribbon when the print starts to become faint. I am sure that those stickers were on high-speed printers, the kind which prints out several inches thick stacks in few minutes.
excellent video. Let me share an old anecdote. For many years ago I got to connect my Amiga to a laser printer and I can tell you that Commodore non PC's do not work well with a laser. The laser of which I cant remember its type had the ability to act like an even older type of Epson matrix printer. And even when this mode was used instead of the direct type that the Amiga actually had a driver to it still did not work very well. All I got from the Amiga/Laser printer setup was some extremely long "loading" times where the Amiga struggled to transfer the print job, and then the printer refusing to print it before I pressed a manual key on the printer itself. Also, I had to guess when that time was, or it would just print whatever halfpage it had received up untill the moment the printer button was pressed down.
I thought from the jump this was going to be corny and I only like my own journeys not watching others'... I was wrong, this was such a fun treat! Thanks!
BitKrieger WD40 is a good solvent, but don’t use it as oil to lubricate moving parts or protect parts from rusting. It evaporates within a few days having removed any trace of oil previously present.
@@Bin216 absolutely true what WD-40 was used for originally and also its namesake. The WD in WD40 is water displacement. AKA getting water out of the way such as in things like Automotive ignition that's gotten wet Etc. And yes it is mainly a solvent. That's why it works great for getting up oil off concrete and a lot of other things. Nope. Just removing the grease and oil. But all kinds of things and WD-40 goes well for. For example belt dressing. Also works good for starter fluid sometimes. Also one time I remember we got a bunch of donated engines and stuff for school for our recreational engine class and we wound up taking a care WD-40 and see which ones would spark up and run. A door to see if it might be actually worth the trying to do something with them. Also true about it's tripping other lubricants way there already there I heard horror stories about that. And of course that person that did it did it in the case that that lubricant would be very very difficult to properly reapply or get them proper lubricant Etc. One of those times was when someone can't remember who. I was working on their vehicle with the window mechanism I think it was the driver side of the equipment passenger front. Of course instead of lubricating it better removed all traces of lubricant after a while even worse. Also for anyone that's interested there is a book called The WD-40 book. Also WD-40 is about as versatile as duct tape I'd say. Also speaking of books there is also the duct tape book 1 and 2. Also you know that WD-40 wore remove adhesive labels as well. Also again book time. The warning label book it's pretty hilarious. By the way the WD-40 book and the duct tape books 1 and 2 are not just fun stuff but also actual tips and more and of course some funny stuff as well.
I’ve found the OkiData ML320/420 dot-matrix printers to be super reliable, but - whatever you do - watch that first sheet of paper and don’t let it roll back into the tractor-feed! That’s the one big >Gotcha!< with these printers. They also have their own 32kB print buffer built in. You can also examine/modify most settings right from the front panel, though it’s not by any means intuitive. The old ones came with a (white) manual that listed all the printer control codes so you could control them programmatically, for both the Epson/IBM compatibility modes using Basic or C/C++, or any other computer language that lets you send raw ASCII codes to the printer through standard out (stdout). There is what I call an “unwanted” Easter egg in the firmware; if you send the “vertical fine line-feed” command with a data byte of 13, you’ll get an unwanted carriage return/line feed, but you could send this command twice with data bytes that added up to 13 and it’d work fine! Don’t ask how many hours I spent tracking this down, nor how many 🤬 I uttered!
Nice vid! I had a Vic20 which I bought a centronics interface for because I worked at Radio Shack and could get deals on standard parallel printers. I coded in 8080 and Z-80 assembly and had friends that did 6502. This HD6303 looks VERY similar to 6502 code, in terms of the mnemonics used. P.S. I used to use the WD40 trick ALL the time and told all my customers. In those days who could afford new ribbons all the time? All good wishes, sir! I have subscribed.
Sold tons of the Panasonic 1124i printers back in the day along with other models. Great printers. That is the most fancy serial to parallel printer box I have seen for a c64. Got to love it. I can also picture some of those used to help tech support. For the time before windows and most printers sort of just worked. I can picture one of the techs getting a help I'm printing garbage call. lol
Xetec, out of Salina Kansas, My home state. Marty's still kicking it, according to his LinkedIn, hammering out code for Garmin. He put time in with such legends as RED, and NewTek.
I had a Panasonic P-KX1123 dot matrix printer. It was 24-pin. The NLQ quality was pretty decent. I used mine to print my senior term paper from my PCjr running WordStar. It got the job done.
I have our old CBM 8096 together with a CBM 8032P. The computer is text only, not even custom fonts, but I read from the manual that you can program the printer and print graphics. I haven't powered the printer yet. I'm still in the process of repairing the 8096 and the 8050. Hopefully one day I'll get to be able to try that function.
As a kid my family had two Centronics-interface printers that we would switch between on the C64, a dot-matrix for graphics and a daisy-wheel for reports and so on. I don’t think we had any sort of interface box; I’m pretty sure my dad just hand-wired a user port to Centronics adapter cable, which seemed to be supported by all of the software we used. I remember the connector being quite flimsy and needed to be handled with care.
Interesting! I've heard of some software supporting user-port printing but I thought most expected the IEC/serial ports to be used. But I really didn't have a lot of experience with printing on the C64 as it was the very last peripheral I got for it.
@@8_Bit I am positive that whatever printers we had worked with Pocket Writer, and I'm pretty sure the dot-matrix one worked with GEOS as well, so that's worth looking at if you're interested in either learning more or proving that I'm completely misremembering how the family computer was set up around 35 years ago. :) No idea what model the printers were, unfortunately.
In late 2012, I sent a lot of stuff to e-recycling that I now regret. Not anything 8-bit but a bunch of old PC stuff. I ALMOST tossed out a 5150 but pulled it back at the last moment.
One of the memories I have of my old Commodore printer was that you generally didn't want to print anything late at night because they were quite loud. When Okidata came out with their thermal printer (which used special paper), I saw a demonstration at a Commodore dealer and my jaw hit the floor at how super quiet they were.
Reinking: At my C64 time I used to crack open printer ribbon cartriges and saturate the sponge rubber wheel inside with stamp ink. However when not printing for some time the needles in the print head became stuck which I then dipped in solvent in a bottle cap for some minutes (nowadays wd40 might also do the trick). Also had a purble tinge. I had a MPS-801, MPS 1230 (still have), STAR LC24-10 (had an LCD display and user settable paper advancement - good for forms - and bidirectional printing adjustment good for faster graphics printing).
You can still buy new printers with a Centronics interface and also serial, along with USB. Dot matrix, which are meant to be used in printing multipart forms for companies, and label printers, which are often using these interfaces for legacy applications that will likely never go away.
I had my eye on a couple new dot matrix printers I saw on Staples.ca but the cheapest was near $300 CAD. I was still slightly tempted, but then found this vintage Panasonic and didn't pursue it further.
@@8_Bit We had a few at work, so I am very familiar with them. Only centronics though, the later models came as standard with centronics, serial and USB support, I guess because the added on daughter board was not worth the hassle of selling separately, so just put it in anyway, because the most common use for there is replacing a dead Epson FX80 or IBM Proprinter, and needing the support for the emulation, plus a working print head that actually printed the dots where needed. We finally moved to a new ERP program, so the printers became redundant, and we sold them at near purchase cost, along with a near decade's worth of printer ribbons, because it was easier to buy them by the box. They replaced Seikosha SP2000 printers, which I was able to repair electrically, but had run out of print heads that would still print straight, instead printing up to 2 dot positions either side of the nominal spot because of the wear in them, and had run out of good needles. The ribbons respond well to endorsing ink with oil, one drop applied then rolled around the unit around 2 times to spread it into the ink reserve.
Thanks Robin, another great video. I agree that the journey is often the best / most important part. The destination in comparison often feels disappointing. I used to have a bunch of old printers (dot matrix, daisy wheel, etc), spare ribbons of all sorts, etc, but they are all gone now apart from an old printer for my Apple ][c. I remember setting dip switches in printers to change fonts and other settings. And then along came Font Packs (memory cards with extra fonts), and these weren't cheap. If I recall correctly, a font pack for a HP laser printer cost over $100, and it only contained a few fonts of very limited sizes, and they weren't great anyway - nothing like today's computers that have more fonts than you can poke a stick at in any size you want.
My dad taught me the WD-40 trick back in the 80's. One ribbon would go faint,and it would get sprayed,and put in a plastic bag to sit for a while,and I'd pull another one out. I had 4-5 ribbons that I kept in rotation into the 90's! Way cheaper,when you're a kid printing out everything you can,with Print Shop.
We had the Star NX-10 9-pin printer when I was of C64 age. I wanted that NX-1000C so bad...every issue of Compute!'s Gazette taunted me with it. "Near" Letter Quality! "Color"! Also appreciated seeing the old Free Pile signs. We're actually considering modifying the "no printers" rule to "no inkjets". The kids are digging the dot matrix lately!
On a hunch I went digging through my computer morgue, and sure enough I found a Super Graphix that I got in a bundle of other stuff off eBay... but it's only the plain jane model, not a Gold and not a Jr. :( And in my Great Computer Purge in the late 90's when I moved into a tiny studio apt. I had to ditch my Star NX-1000C (worked beautifully with GEOS) and HP Deskjet 500 (paired with my Amiga 500). Though I did pick up a cheap MPS-803 a couple months ago and it's been working great, and I even found some new ribbons for it. Printed many calendars on it so far.
I was gonna go and find my C=64 to parallel interface to share -- and I did -- but it's got zero identifying information on it! Nothing but an FCC compliance tag. It connected to the C=64 serial port and stole 5V (via a single wire) from the cassette port with a card edge connector that itself had an extender so you could still use the cassette. The goodies were conformally wrapped in a fiberglass shell that didn't quite hide the innards, and didn't provide a strain relieve for the data cable, either. It had a 6 position DIP switch the pokes thru the housing, and the parallel connector came out opposite the cable end. Anyway, that thing provided a C=64 to parallel adaptation. This was then connected to a Smith Corona "Messenger Module" which itself was a parallel printer to typewriter interface/buffer. And that was plugged in to a Smith Corona daisy wheel typewriter input port, resulting in typewriter quality output from Homeword or Paperback Writer, or whatever you liked. And it was LOUD! And that carriage return shook the table it sat on! But amazingly, this super-klugey chain of interfaces worked, and multiple five paragraph themes were produced.
A laser printer doesn't actually print until its done putting the page together in its memory. Try sending a CONTROL-L to the printer, that should make it print the printers buffer
I think I tried that at one point in my experiments, and also made an endless loop printing "HELLO WORLD" or whatever and it never did trigger a print. Thanks, I'll give it another shot at some point.
Yay Xetec! Kinda under-appreciated in the C64 world, IMO. I did alot of reports in the day using the Fontmaster word processor. But the big deal with this interface is that big RAM buffer that actually buffers data, and greatly speeds up printing from the slow C64 to the slow SG-10 printer. (The SG-10 could accept data pretty quickly, but not when it was actively printing.)
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Thanks for reviving some old memories and for spotlighting this product I designed long ago. Amazingly, TH-cam suggested this video for me (I do watch some retro tech videos, so...)
The FLICKINGER easter egg was just a joke -- didn't really do anything else. I looked in the original source (yes, I still have it) and the only other undocumented commands were:
"*6" which forced a trap (for testing)
"/" which printed the current state of all the zero page variables (for debugging purposes)
"ZP"+CHR$(address)+CHR$(data) which permitted modification of one of these variables (at specified address), setting it to the data value provided. Again for debugging purposes
The funny thing about hiding easter eggs in the command channel (in mostly ASCII) is that occasionally someone from Xetec's call support dept. would come tell me that a customer called in and said that he accidentally printed a bunch of text to the command channel and something odd printed out -- a mysterious phrase or even a bitmap of a girl's face (my girlfriend at the time). No, that was in another product. Yes, I regularly included easter eggs in nearly every product I designed. Didn't have peer code reviews back then so it was easy to slip in just about anything (that would fit in the ROM).
Fantastic, I'm really glad you found the video! Excellent work with the Gold and all your products, and thanks for sharing the extra undocumented commands. Since I'm new to the 6303 instruction set it's a lot slower for me to decipher it than 6502. Those other easter eggs sound fantastic, if you've got hints you're willing to share, let me know :)
@@8_Bit I remember the HD6303 was great in that it had a lot of I/O and integrated timers and the ability to address a large external memory space. So it had a ton of ROM code space (for the day). Was an expensive part, IIRC, so we didn't use it in the lower cost products
I feel like I've gained some sort of closure I didn't know I wanted.
@@thebush6077 Celery, this kind of stuff is still used. I support 2400 and 4800 baud dial-up modems on RS-232 for sprinkler systems. There's a whole slew of computer equipment that has not , nor will ever be, updated.
Wow, you’re THE guy...you wrote the program Fontmaster II. I love that program! Granted, I haven’t used it in many years, but back when my C64 was my primary computer for word processing and such, I loved the variety of fonts and the ability to make new ones. I also love the variety of text effects and formatting that it can do. With no manual and no internet back then, I had to try all the key combinations to find out what the controls were, and wrote my own manual for it. Excellent program and very well done!
"Printer ribbon companies don't want you to know this one weird old trick!"
The translation of "L'amour est bien plus fort que nous" is "Love is stronger than us" or "Love is stronger than we are".
Which makes a lot more sense than "Love is stronger far than we" ;)
Source : Me, I speak French
Nice video :)
There's passive-aggressive and then there's "Robin reluctantly reads a mechanical translation of French."
What is the effect of the word "bien" in the sentence? Does it correspond to any English word or does it just add nuance?
@@FadkinsDiet bien = beaucoup in this context. plus = more, bien plus = much more. So a more accurate translation would be 'love is much stronger than we are' .
I agree it's an awkward translation, but it's apparently the chosen English translation of the song title. Here's the song: th-cam.com/video/0hx-f01M1s0/w-d-xo.html
Probably because the stressed syllables can be made to almost match up that way. Is--est, fort--far, etc
T.O.F. button = "Top Of Form". If you set up your tractor feed right, that would jump the paper to the next tear0ff perforation.
Laser printers, unlike the dot matrix ones, need to fill a whole page or receive an "end of page" character (a.k.a. "Form Feed" in text/ascii mode) before they start printing anything. Otherwise, they sit there indefinitely waiting for more content.
I'll have to experiment more. I'm pretty sure at one point I did try sending form feeds, and in another version I made an infinite loop that kept printing text to the printer and left it for several minutes, with no success. I just looked, and I show that program at 7:48 though I had commented the GOTO at line 100 out again.
@@8_Bit I happen to have a similar printer.
I can confirm that it does not print raw text until you send FormFeed code (HEX: 0C) to it.
I never tried feeding it a bunch of text for auto-pagination - that may be configurable in printer's settings (the LCD menus). If the printer displays an error after a few minutes of input - this is a good indication that it may have run out of memory without recieving a FF.
To test this try printing from DOS (not command window, actual DOS). Or install some generic dumb lineprinter driver - does not have to be HP and then print from command windows (echo Hello>LPT1 etc)
The interface converter may also send centronics port signals that confuse the printer or it may not expect the printer to constantly be "ready" or something like that. A lot could have gone wrong and it's not very easy to diagnose. A logic analyzer could help.
It is possible that the device needs a specific combination of DIP switches to work with newer printers - although it seems unlikely, more likely it won't ever work with those.
I may be remember incorrectly but I seem to recall my Okimate not automatically ending a print with Form Feed/Carriage Return. This was 25 or so years ago so I could be remembering wrong.
Retro-regret - lamenting all of the classic computer hardware we've simply thrown away over the years.
Yep. I have the same regret. Now I buy computer tech I used to own from eBay for the nostalgia!
I used to have a crapton of Commodore stuff which I donated to the local children's museum, and was dismayed to learn that it just went into storage instead of being used in their computing exhibit. Later I rebuilt my collection when it was cheap (like $20 for a C64 from a thrift shop) and then ended up long-term lending it to a friend who wanted to teach his kid how to program... and then it just ended up in *his* storage unit, and I ended up losing touch with him.
Wish I had kept my Plus/4. At least I still have my VIC-20 and it still works.
Sometimes, late at night, I will remember that time I tossed away this or that computer or part. It will make me physically cringe with sadness and regret. Other times I have bought back the same item I tossed away from eBay.
@@christopher88719 I get this watching a lot of these videos where they say how much they just paid for this vintage part etc and I think "I had 2 of those but binned them" 🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️
1:27 "so if you don't want so see the journey..." Hey wait a minute, it's all about the journey, who wants to miss that part.
Yep! I had a huge purge of all my retro stuff in the mid 2000s too. So sad!
Do you still have your A2000 from college??
@@guru332 Long gone sadly!! Parents sold that at a garage sale and that was after I stored it at their house for many years... I was pretty sad when I found out. Luckily I've replaced pretty much everything I ever had and more! You still have your 3000 and CD32?
@@adriansdigitalbasement Yep. Still have my CD32 and A3000. I've also picked up a C128D and a few other commodore computers along the way. I fired up my A3000 last year and found an old pic of all of us from college! I sent a copy to Scott.
@@adriansdigitalbasement I lost all of my 8bit stuff to the destruction of my home 10yrs ago. Now I cannot afford to replace it thanks to being disabled. I owned C64s, 128s (no D models) a dozen or so 1541,1571,and 81 drives (mixed), An Amiga 2000, Atari 800XL along with a 1050 drive (my second computer I ever owned - my first was a Timex/Sinclair 1000)... and a crapton of original boxed software for the C64 (my favorites were the gold box set of D&D titles from SSI of which I had all of them), and an assortment of original boxed Atari software as well. I also had a couple of monitors, and ALOT of original magazines from the period (Compute!, Compute's Gazette, ANTIC, etc). I damn near cry every time I think about what I lost. I am not even going to go into the Vinyl I lost.
I threw out a wall of Mac SEs and SE30s, baskets loaded with AT and XT cards, piles of 386 and 486 machines, mountains of Commodore stuff, Mac clones, the works when I was in my teens. Everything was pristine and working.Total investment was maybe 200 bucks at the time. These days the decimal point would move to the right at least once. Whoops.
Seeing this must make the author so happy, his Easter eggs finally revealed after somebody dumped and disassembled the ROM.
Would've loved to have known that WD-40 trick when I was frantically trying to write and print reports in junior high, the night before they were due.
It's been around since the early 1990's, at least when I learned it off a BBS or read it in a magazine.
I thought the same thing.
I remember those days. I turned in a report printed on rolled fax paper with a thermal printer, each page cut to a different length, and written on Speedscript when I didn’t know anything about formatting or line wrap. I got marked down because it looked like total shit!
@@00Skyfox lack of true descending characters on the CBM 1526 drove one of my teachers crazy.
@@timmooney7528 Funny how teachers would focus on insignificant things like that rather than the information content of the report being turned in.
TH-cam recommendations strikes again! Honestly didn’t think I would watch more than a few mins of this and would be doing a lot of fast forwarding. I ended up watching the whole video! Great content, keep it up! You earned a sub today!
Ah, tractor feeds! And binders of 20-inch wide printouts, hung on mobile racks! Uh-oh, I'm dating myself!
If they used a 5V wall-wart, the voltage drop across the small gauge conductors might become significant.
With a 9V PS, even if you drop 0.5V each way, you'll still have 8V which is enough to get a solid 5V out of the regulator.
Nice to see an 8-bit computing channel that isn't just Mr. Takes a Rifle to Subway-Guy
Wait...that's a channel?
@@peterlamont647 8-bit guy carried a huge gun to subway lmao
I remember back to working at Ford where I replaced a many DC-DC boards in that same laptop model. That component aside, they're quite reliable.
My Dad was a manual writer/documentation specialist back in the 80's... he would love your comments about a well written manual!
@ungratefulmetalpansy this! I sometimes have to write how to or small manual and this is a task as big as doing the device described. Even having today's tools available
Somehow I was expecting to see the 'random maze' beeing used to test the printer, but thanks for yet another interesting video!
Challenge accepted! --- Robin
Ugh, the missed opportunity!
I tried doing that once, but in text mode my printer interface put too big a gap between the lines. I bet the super graphix gold could do it with the right dip switch setting though.
Every video you make is a beautiful journey. Narrated by a hand :)
Hahaha! I've been watching Robin's vids now for a couple of weeks straight. I think my wife is getting annoyed. She recently asked if I was still watching the "instructional hand videos"! :rofl:
The nostalgia in this episode is through the roof 🤤
Wow, I'd forgotten that I ever owned a printer for my C64 but the moment you pulled out the MPS801 I instantly recognised it as one I had.
I recall using a program from Compute!'s Gazette to make "true decenders" so the g, q, etc. did not look so odd on the MPS801.
Those printers were a walk down memory lane. My first job in the mid-80s as a teenager was at a mom and pop Commodore shop. I remember the ads (probably from Compute!) for the Super Graphix Gold but don't think I ever used one.
Absolutely loved the ribbon-refurbish and the egg-hunting. Quality work. Art for the sake of art. Thank you so much.
Three year old video, but worth mentioning:
Although the 70s and 80s electronics operated at 4.7 vdc with TTL ICs, or 3.2 vdc with MOS, the stepper motors used in these old printers worked most effectively at 9 vdc. The board in the device usually included a 7805 - 5volt regulator (17:07 just left of the RAM IC) to power the ICs. The Commodore 64 had a 9 *vac* input from the brick power supply along with it's rectified 5vdc. The 9 vac was stepped up to 12 volts and used in the audio/video outputs; the 9 vac is sent through to the RS-232 connector and also used as a 60hz timing standard for the CIA.
The idea of using a 9 volt input was to supply more voltage than the regulated voltage that the ICs needed to insure the voltage level wouldn't drop below 4.7 volts when all chips and components were pulling maximum power.
I have just scored the Everything 64 after 35 years of searching, saving and accumulating, saving from Australian Bushfires, and so much more.
I am chuffed to see this, but my Commodore MPS printer probably won’t play along.
The WD-40 nugget helps, Thank You!
Where on earth does one find “Tractor Feed” paper now?
Common as a tennis ball in 1990, now we re-powder our cartridges and paper grows on trees!
I literally saw 2 pallets of boxes of paper outside the shop selling face masks for $20ea today.
A face mask is currently worth more than a box of reams of paper!
I thoroughly enjoyed this video - thanks for digging into this bit of retro gear!
What other one video has hardware, software, easter eggs, two kinds of old computers and old print cart tips? =)
Ditto loved it loved it loved it keep it up keep it up keep it up.
The Jumpers for the power can be used to operate the interface without the power supply.
Centronics has a +5V pin, some printers provide +5V on this pin for interfaces like this. I can't remember the specs any more but I think it was rated for 100 or 150mA which is not a lot depending on what the interface does!
The current capability would depend entirely on the power supply in the printer. It probably already has a 5V output for the printer logic. It could supply an additional 100mA or more easily.
@@simontay4851 There needs to be a standard so the printer manufacturer knows how much current the printer has at least to provide and the interface manufacturer knows how much current may be taken without damaging the printer.It is a very low current, I often had struggled keeping the current within the specified limit.
A simple 7805 voltage regulator is 1A. If the printer needs 800mA for itself and someone draws more than 200mA out of the port, the electronics inside the printer will brown-out! Current limiters as common today (USB) were not possible in the 1980s - at least not economic!
Thanks for sharing "the journey!" Great memories of the Super Graphix.
The E-Mu fact slide absolutely blew my mind! Thank you for that!
That interface looked SO familiar -- I swear I owned one.
They're worth a fortune now! I've been looking for one to show on the channel for a year now, but they're way too expensive.
A lot of options on that interface. It seems like a very advanced thing for those days.
Nice user image AKA user image checks out.
@@aaronbrandenburg2441 Floppies rock!
The "privileged access" wouldn't be a reference to the old Wargames movie from 1983 starring Mathew Broderick? Just a guess...
Yes. It looks like 'Joshua' password recognized by WOPR backdoor login th-cam.com/video/q14OTYVKMWc/w-d-xo.html
Makes me want to watch war games again. Its such a nerdy movie and i love it.
I'm a big fan of your channel and your predilection for the process instead of the destination. Anyway I saw this video and you mentioned that you couldn't get that HP printer to work with your Commodore 64, in spite of your best efforts. I think you're right around my age ( I'm 52), and quite frankly I'm surprised you didn't know right away what the problem was, especially when you could get it to work with your laptop.
Back in the late 90s, there was a trend towards using software in the form of drivers to do what should have been done in hardware. I'm talking about softmodems, more commonly known as Winmodems, because they only worked with Windows 95/98 to do the modulation and demodulation. Printers followed the same trend. HP was notorious for this kind of thing and other companies followed suit. Winprinters required a "firmware upload" at print time and only the Windows drivers could accomplish this. That's why, in spite of you learning the JPL printer language, you couldn't get the printer to work.
Winmodems were the most prevalent but printers did the same thing. It was, in my opinion, a disgusting way to cut costs, because they didn't have to invest engineering efforts into developing the hardware for either the printers or the modems and instead put the impetus on the software development team to do the job instead.
You won't find much about this period of computing online and I suspect it's primarily due to the nauseating nature of the cost-cutting at every opportunity that was going on in the late 90s.
Just something I wanted to share with you in case others were unaware of the shenanigans involved with the printer.
Keep up the good work and keep those videos coming! They're awesome!
I'm always amazed that easter eggs are even found in most cases. And I guess that's kinda the point.
Hey! That LaserJet 2300 is the exact printer that I still use! It's an awesome printer. Mine is the 2300dn, which has the duplex unit. It also has the ethernet card, and someone fitted mine with the maximum amount of RAM it can take (I can't remember what that is -- I think 192MB? Which is pretty huge for the time it was made, but it really is an office printer). It prints incredibly well and the toner is not expensive. Mine needs a little bit of maintenance work, but I won't be giving it up any time soon.
Nothing says the 80s quite like that Commodore MPS 801.
mps801 from memory printed at 50cps, tractor feed paper only, and uni-directonal printing - (it actually used a clock spring to return the head to rest postion.)
I had that KXP-1124 back in 1988-1992 and loved it. I never did a 9 pin as I used a thermal from Brother and went to the KXP 24 pin and it was a wonderful printer.
18:57 That cut to Homer Simpson was just perfect :-D very funny
Its amazing how you find these and even better you document them. ty! And you need about a million more subscribers. Your channel is that good
That's a pretty early embedded/microcontroller device. This is pretty great!
Ended up watching the whole video. Thank you for sharing.
I owned this one back in the day, I had it attached to a daisy wheel printer, so I could word process and get high quality output to hand in for my grade 12 essays. Half way through first year University I upgraded to a DOS PC with a hard disk and WordPerfect for DOS, for my essays, as I was not happy with the capabilities of my Commodore for essay writing.
Thinking back, I can still hear that rata-tata-tatta sound that my old daisy wheel printer made.
I totally forgot the Panasonic Printers! But suddenly your video caused a WHOAH in my brain. I had one of these! Although 24 pin printer, it might have been a KX-P1123? I think that was mine. But I might be wrong. Fascinating how memories get lost, but are still buried. You just need the right tickle.
What a stunning video! This took me back in time as well. Just love when you show all the printers. That was sure a trip down the memory lane. Then the sparkle came when you show that "Panasonic KX-P1124", MMP printer! I used to have one of them for a long time. Totally loved it. Now, I must get one again!
Thanks for another great video :)
One thing to be careful with on the WD40 trick - if the ribbon cassette has rubber wheels inside, WD40 will make them swell and not work properly.
It works best for ribbons that dried out while sitting, not from being used up. I found the effect isn't long lasting on Apple Imagewriter ribbons, I ended up re-inking them with stamp pad ink... a messy job for sure!
I regret throwing away much of my old 80s and 90s computer stuff. Never thought I would miss it.
I completely understand :( I've got a list of things that I got rid of and regret, and once in a while I re-find that stuff on eBay when I can afford it.
0:01 I had a Super Grafix Jr. I don't suppose that has the Easter Egg.
3:31 Printer = 4, 5 and Disk = 8+ leaves devices 6 and 7 unaccounted for.
4:12 $416 1990 CAD = $727 2020 CAD.
5:05 I had a 1525 printer as well. That thing was freaking loud!
8:24 24 pins - luxury!
10:03 If it has a 5V regulator, does that mean any voltage above 5V can be used with it? Why wouldn't they supply a 6V adapter and produce less heat?
14:47 "pR" = "PRINT#" is probably why they added the "?" abbreviation for "PRINT". The tokens have to match the longest keyword string.
16:22 Looks like the Hitachi 6303 is a 6809-compatible microcontroller with 256 bytes of RAM, 24 parallel I/O lines, timers, and an asynchronous-serial interface.
18:24 The 6809 instruction set is significantly more powerful than the 6502's. 16-bit index registers, 16-bit stack pointer, 8/16-bit accumulator, 16-bit operations. The 6502 was a reduced derivative of the 6809.
20:10 It could have said, "Greetings, Professor Falken".
As far as I know, the Super Graphix Jr. doesn't have any easter eggs - though I haven't looked! I assume it's more cramped for space in the ROM, anyway.
Yeah, that MC7805C regulator can handle up to 18V I think. No idea why they went with a 9V supply though.
Finding 16-bit addresses when disassembling the 6303 code was a breeze as they were never split apart like 6502 code is, with LDA #lowbyte : STA somewhere : LDA #highbyte : STA somewhere+1.
7805 regulators need the input voltage to be about 2 volts higher than the output, so using a 9 volt power supply is pretty normal.
? was added as an alias for PRINT in 8K Altair BASIC, which didn't have PRINT# and didn't support upper/lowercase characters. Abbreviations with shifted characters seem to appear first in 6502 BASIC Microsoft did for PET and they seem to exist only on Commodore. Notably, 6502 MS BASIC for Atari and Z80 MS BASICs on PC-88 and MSX are case insensitive and shifted abbreviations do not work (but ? obviously does).
7805 Regulators can handle between 7 and 21 volts, and then outputs it as 5, but it's preferable to be on the lower end because it has to sink more power as heat otherwise. Thus a 6 volt power supply wouldn't function. They probably went for a 9 volt power supply as those were far more common back then. Also the 6502 came out before the 6809, but they're both related to the 6800 in different ways.
@@makomk Yep, I was going to say that too. To anyone reading this, you should be aware that any voltage above that will be converted to heat, so it's best to keep the difference between input and output as low as possible.
Great video! I had 2 Commodore printers, the 801 and the 803 and unfortunately I got rid of them. However, I still have my Star Micronix SG10 printer that I bought new back in the day. The great thing about it, and the reason I bought it, is that it uses just a simple typewriter ribbon on a spool which you can still find easily today. I also have two centronics printer interfaces, the one I used is a Cardco and I can't remember the other one that was given to me. When I got my first inkjet printer, a Canon BJ10e, I remember hooking up my C128 to it through the Cardco and using Epson settings, printing text on a word processor, probably Timeworks Wordwriter, from the C128 to the Canon. But I was quite busy with work and raising two kids and never fully played around with it and at some point I got rid of the Canon printer so I can't play around with it today. Maybe that would be an idea for a future video for you to do!
Cool trick with the printer ribbons. I need to do that on some of my vintage printers with dried out ribbons.
I love the ink ribbon hack, I got an old Imagewriter 2 not long ago, unfortunately both ink ribbons were not only dried out but the ribbon broke as soon as I tried winding it!
My MPS-801 is still my "backup" printer. Slow, one-directional, loud as hell, but it gets the job done. Later buying an MPS-1200 I was like OMG WHOA
I spent 25 yrs as a reseller, and remembering all the "useless" equipment we threw out, makes me cringe. I always enjoyed the sound of dot matrix printers "singing",
Garth Howe As a kid, it boggled me that a machine that sounded like it was ripping up metal was just printing stuff.
Then in 1992 I saw mainframes THROWING wide blue & white tractor feed in the air and changing tapes over for a reason I never understood, then running back to the print room to change out the tractor feed paper so that the mainframe could zing it through and throw it in the air again.
At this juncture of my life I decided I didn’t want to be a mainframe operator.
Actually. Matrix printers can quote on quote sing.
Look up. Matrix Foreigner music here on TH-cam You'll see what I'm talking about.
Note it's just instrumental not voice.
Such a joy to watch the journey here, and some surprising "treasures" were uncovered!
KXP-145! How many of those have I used! Haven't thought of that in years. Oh, that crunk-crunk printer sound!
Your French is perfectly fine. As of the sentence, I believe it is a pun on the more common saying "l'amour est plus fort que tout" (loosely, "love conquers all") where "tout" is swapped with the rhyming "nous" (us).
Another fascinating video!
I believe there are GEOS drivers for the Lasermate, uncertain if they are straight Centronics or GeoCable specific.
And the circuit board inside that interface is very cleanly laid out, the labelling is very well done. Certainly seems they intended to make it easy if anyone wanted to apply the modifications.
Yes, it's a very nice board layout! I'm going to try to find a GeoCable to further test this laser printer, they seem hard to find though.
One of my first commercial products in the early 80's was print buffers for Apple II, and Commodore PETS. They had a huge 16k buffer! with Centronics or IEEE options. Love the dotmatrix sound.
Speaking of dot matrix sound and dot matrix printers.
I used to play a game I can't remember if it was on my own PC or friends!?
But this is the back-in-the-day would not home PCS have sound cards back in the day.
Nowadays seems like everything is on the motherboard!
But on that game the printer was used in several different ways.
For some time things it would ask you to have your printer active it would do this anytime before kind of redundant if you would just have the printer runny I'd say.
For example when you were doing certain things you would get printouts of various things in the game.
You could even have it print out your password 4 levels as well.
But there were all sorts of functions in the game that would actually use it almost like a terminal in-game.
The other thing is going back to sound.
Of course it could use PC speaker but something very clever that it did it use the printer to produce music it was not exactly in tune and everything but it was pretty interesting that was able to do this just in a game.
I cannot recall for the life of me what this was called or even how it played out it's just so foggy in my mind but just remember it using a printer for a lot of things.
Why understand it was pretty obscure and very few people knew about it.
I won't fight was novelty it forces something that was being spirit with but who knows!
Of course this was nowhere near the quality of those videos are on TH-cam where a printer is used to produce music since that was done specifically to do things like this and evening as in tweaking to get things just right to produce musical tones so of course that was just hammering out quite literally on the printhead to produce music in the game I could have sworn that it it didn't even sound almost like speech in a couple places but I could be mistaken
That WD-40 fix is magic voodoo, but also an incredible boon -- thanks Robin!
The Commodore MPS801-a true NLQ printer: the smudges it made on the paper nearly looked like letters. And the return spring! Woo hoo! Bringin' back the memories!
Dammit. I thought the WD-40 trick was something only *I* did way, way back. I used to split the cartridge open and spray the whole ribbon at once without the straw. Worked great! Thanks for the nice memory!
The Commodore 801 styling reminds me a lot of my Atari 1029 printer - which, of course, I threw away years ago.
I had one. It was an okay printer. But the styling didn't really fit in with the rest of the range. It was made by a subsiduary of Seiko which might explain that.
@@6581punk Served me plenty well at the time, plus faster and more versatile than the alternative of a 1027 'letter quality' printer.
@Jimbaloidatron They look similar because both printers were in fact manufatured by Seikosha, a subsidiary of the Seiko watch maker. The mechanism is probably identical, only the outer plastic shell was styled differently to be in line with Atari's and Commodore's products, respectively. The MPS801, at least, was also sold under the Tandy name, as well as by Seikosha itself.
Sources: www.atarimuseum.com/computers/8BITS/XL/xlperipherals/1029.html www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/MPS-801
@@BertGrink Makes complete sense, as they use the same ribbon! They'd have needed to add the appropriate bus interface smarts, so a little more work was needed.
@@Jimbaloidatron The bus interface is most likely just an interchangeable plug-in module, much in the same way that some of Commodore's bigger printers had: the MPS1200 with the 6-pin-DIN IEC interface, and the MPS1250 with a standard Centronics interface (both were, as far as I know, made by Olivetti). A third model, the MPS1230 ( _definitely_ made by Olivetti) had both types of interface.
Press the little button at the rear of that ribbon, where it is marked with the small arrow, and this presses the ink roller to get the ink in the inner sections out to transfer to the ribbon.
Wow. I had this setup back in the day. Hooked to my super fancy Amiga 3000T!
I had one of these to hook up our Star Micronics printer to our C128 , brings back memories.
THAT PRINTER PRINTS IN BOTH DIRECTIONS!!?!?!?!!! Where was this the last 20 years of my company printing reports on lexmark form printers?
That bi-directional printing was a neat optimization that printer manufacturers started making; much faster printing with no extra hardware needed (as long as the firmware improvements could fit in the allotted ROM and RAM).
I had a printer which did this although it tended to cause *slight* differences in alignment depending on whether it printed forwards or backwards, meaning that a vertical line would look very bumpy. It was fine for rough drafts or if you're not doing graphics or boxes.
They weren't so accurate when doing that, though, so you wouldn't use it for something that needed to look really snazzy.
Fine for rough drafts, however.
I'm pretty sure my Epson LX-400 printer was bi-directional too.
Jesse Carlton Practically all dot matrix (and inkjet and daisy-wheel) printers in the PC era have supported bidirectional printing, with the quality caveats others already mentioned. It’s bizarre that your company didn’t have their report print job set up to use it, since I assume that wasn’t a quality-critical application!
Old Epson dot matrix printer had easteregg commands. I stumbled over some in the 90th writing a specialized printer driver to repurposed the printer as a scanner.
You used to be able to get ribbon ink in a can. It worked great! I tossed out my old can a couple months ago. :)
Hello there! I have one of these printer interfaces. I remember setting Epson compatibility mode on my NX-1000. (Hopefully, I'm remembering correctly.) I wouldn't think the interface would ever work with a laser printer, because you cannot set the laser printers to IBM Proprinter or Epson emulation. I had forgotten about the FF required for the laser printer to kick anything out. Thanks for making this video. I remember using GEOS with Japanese fonts to print out my homework. I also got rid of the AC Adapter almost immediately, once I learned the device can pull power the interface connection.
Great Video - Loved the Journey. I also regret all of the old equipment that I donated and trashed over the years. I couldn't wait to move to Ink Jet printers from my old dot matrix printers. I've only got one old Commodore printer and the Vic plotter left. As someone that still uses dot matrix printers at work everyday, I wish we could use the WD-40 trick, but all of our Hazardous Chemicals have to be called out specifically in Tech data to be allowed. Xetec was a great company; loved their Commodore and Amiga products.
The ink in the ribbon also lubricates the printer head. I have seen stickers in printers that tell you not to print without a ribbon and replace the ribbon when the print starts to become faint.
I am sure that those stickers were on high-speed printers, the kind which prints out several inches thick stacks in few minutes.
excellent video. Let me share an old anecdote. For many years ago I got to connect my Amiga to a laser printer and I can tell you that Commodore non PC's do not work well with a laser. The laser of which I cant remember its type had the ability to act like an even older type of Epson matrix printer. And even when this mode was used instead of the direct type that the Amiga actually had a driver to it still did not work very well. All I got from the Amiga/Laser printer setup was some extremely long "loading" times where the Amiga struggled to transfer the print job, and then the printer refusing to print it before I pressed a manual key on the printer itself. Also, I had to guess when that time was, or it would just print whatever halfpage it had received up untill the moment the printer button was pressed down.
I thought from the jump this was going to be corny and I only like my own journeys not watching others'... I was wrong, this was such a fun treat! Thanks!
When in doubt: WD-40
BitKrieger WD40 is a good solvent, but don’t use it as oil to lubricate moving parts or protect parts from rusting. It evaporates within a few days having removed any trace of oil previously present.
@@Bin216 absolutely true what WD-40 was used for originally and also its namesake.
The WD in WD40 is water displacement.
AKA getting water out of the way such as in things like Automotive ignition that's gotten wet Etc.
And yes it is mainly a solvent.
That's why it works great for getting up oil off concrete and a lot of other things.
Nope. Just removing the grease and oil. But all kinds of things and WD-40 goes well for.
For example belt dressing.
Also works good for starter fluid sometimes.
Also one time I remember we got a bunch of donated engines and stuff for school for our recreational engine class and we wound up taking a care WD-40 and see which ones would spark up and run.
A door to see if it might be actually worth the trying to do something with them.
Also true about it's tripping other lubricants way there already there I heard horror stories about that.
And of course that person that did it did it in the case that that lubricant would be very very difficult to properly reapply or get them proper lubricant Etc.
One of those times was when someone can't remember who.
I was working on their vehicle with the window mechanism I think it was the driver side of the equipment passenger front.
Of course instead of lubricating it better removed all traces of lubricant after a while even worse.
Also for anyone that's interested there is a book called The WD-40 book.
Also WD-40 is about as versatile as duct tape I'd say.
Also speaking of books there is also the duct tape book 1 and 2.
Also you know that WD-40 wore remove adhesive labels as well.
Also again book time.
The warning label book it's pretty hilarious.
By the way the WD-40 book and the duct tape books 1 and 2 are not just fun stuff but also actual tips and more and of course some funny stuff as well.
WD40 or duct tape, it’s always one or the other. Sometimes a big hammer.
I’ve found the OkiData ML320/420 dot-matrix printers to be super reliable, but - whatever you do - watch that first sheet of paper and don’t let it roll back into the tractor-feed! That’s the one big >Gotcha!< with these printers. They also have their own 32kB print buffer built in. You can also examine/modify most settings right from the front panel, though it’s not by any means intuitive. The old ones came with a (white) manual that listed all the printer control codes so you could control them programmatically, for both the Epson/IBM compatibility modes using Basic or C/C++, or any other computer language that lets you send raw ASCII codes to the printer through standard out (stdout).
There is what I call an “unwanted” Easter egg in the firmware; if you send the “vertical fine line-feed” command with a data byte of 13, you’ll get an unwanted carriage return/line feed, but you could send this command twice with data bytes that added up to 13 and it’d work fine! Don’t ask how many hours I spent tracking this down, nor how many 🤬 I uttered!
Another fascinating Commodore video. I like to watch your "way to the Easter Egg".
Good stuff as usual. I too enjoy the journey more than the destination a lot of times. Also your little songs at the end. :-)
Great video! I love the journey, not just the destination.
WD40 on an ink ribbon?! That’s the beste knowledge I acquired in the last few years. If I only knew 30 years ago :)
Nice vid! I had a Vic20 which I bought a centronics interface for because I worked at Radio Shack and could get deals on standard parallel printers. I coded in 8080 and Z-80 assembly and had friends that did 6502. This HD6303 looks VERY similar to 6502 code, in terms of the mnemonics used. P.S. I used to use the WD40 trick ALL the time and told all my customers. In those days who could afford new ribbons all the time? All good wishes, sir! I have subscribed.
whoah. did not know I was gonna get the printer ribbon trick too. GOLD.
Holy cow! That wd40 tip is fantastic! All those years ago, how many print cartridges I tossed that could been saved had I only known...
Sold tons of the Panasonic 1124i printers back in the day along with other models. Great printers. That is the most fancy serial to parallel printer box I have seen for a c64. Got to love it. I can also picture some of those used to help tech support. For the time before windows and most printers sort of just worked. I can picture one of the techs getting a help I'm printing garbage call. lol
Xetec, out of Salina Kansas, My home state. Marty's still kicking it, according to his LinkedIn, hammering out code for Garmin. He put time in with such legends as RED, and NewTek.
Absolutely agree, the journey is often so much more rewarding than the destination.
I had a Panasonic P-KX1123 dot matrix printer. It was 24-pin. The NLQ quality was pretty decent. I used mine to print my senior term paper from my PCjr running WordStar. It got the job done.
I have our old CBM 8096 together with a CBM 8032P. The computer is text only, not even custom fonts, but I read from the manual that you can program the printer and print graphics. I haven't powered the printer yet. I'm still in the process of repairing the 8096 and the 8050. Hopefully one day I'll get to be able to try that function.
As a kid my family had two Centronics-interface printers that we would switch between on the C64, a dot-matrix for graphics and a daisy-wheel for reports and so on. I don’t think we had any sort of interface box; I’m pretty sure my dad just hand-wired a user port to Centronics adapter cable, which seemed to be supported by all of the software we used. I remember the connector being quite flimsy and needed to be handled with care.
Interesting! I've heard of some software supporting user-port printing but I thought most expected the IEC/serial ports to be used. But I really didn't have a lot of experience with printing on the C64 as it was the very last peripheral I got for it.
@@8_Bit I am positive that whatever printers we had worked with Pocket Writer, and I'm pretty sure the dot-matrix one worked with GEOS as well, so that's worth looking at if you're interested in either learning more or proving that I'm completely misremembering how the family computer was set up around 35 years ago. :) No idea what model the printers were, unfortunately.
In late 2012, I sent a lot of stuff to e-recycling that I now regret. Not anything 8-bit but a bunch of old PC stuff. I ALMOST tossed out a 5150 but pulled it back at the last moment.
I just love how this device looks like a bottle of sunscreen with some dip switches inserted B-)
Too bad I'm a few provinces over, I have a ton of parallel printers. Also a bunch of Commodore and Compatible printers :)
One of the memories I have of my old Commodore printer was that you generally didn't want to print anything late at night because they were quite loud. When Okidata came out with their thermal printer (which used special paper), I saw a demonstration at a Commodore dealer and my jaw hit the floor at how super quiet they were.
Reinking:
At my C64 time I used to crack open printer ribbon cartriges and saturate the sponge rubber wheel inside with stamp ink. However when not printing for some time the needles in the print head became stuck which I then dipped in solvent in a bottle cap for some minutes (nowadays wd40 might also do the trick). Also had a purble tinge. I had a MPS-801, MPS 1230 (still have), STAR LC24-10 (had an LCD display and user settable paper advancement - good for forms - and bidirectional printing adjustment good for faster graphics printing).
You can still buy new printers with a Centronics interface and also serial, along with USB. Dot matrix, which are meant to be used in printing multipart forms for companies, and label printers, which are often using these interfaces for legacy applications that will likely never go away.
I had my eye on a couple new dot matrix printers I saw on Staples.ca but the cheapest was near $300 CAD. I was still slightly tempted, but then found this vintage Panasonic and didn't pursue it further.
@@8_Bit We had a few at work, so I am very familiar with them. Only centronics though, the later models came as standard with centronics, serial and USB support, I guess because the added on daughter board was not worth the hassle of selling separately, so just put it in anyway, because the most common use for there is replacing a dead Epson FX80 or IBM Proprinter, and needing the support for the emulation, plus a working print head that actually printed the dots where needed.
We finally moved to a new ERP program, so the printers became redundant, and we sold them at near purchase cost, along with a near decade's worth of printer ribbons, because it was easier to buy them by the box.
They replaced Seikosha SP2000 printers, which I was able to repair electrically, but had run out of print heads that would still print straight, instead printing up to 2 dot positions either side of the nominal spot because of the wear in them, and had run out of good needles.
The ribbons respond well to endorsing ink with oil, one drop applied then rolled around the unit around 2 times to spread it into the ink reserve.
Thanks Robin, another great video. I agree that the journey is often the best / most important part. The destination in comparison often feels disappointing. I used to have a bunch of old printers (dot matrix, daisy wheel, etc), spare ribbons of all sorts, etc, but they are all gone now apart from an old printer for my Apple ][c. I remember setting dip switches in printers to change fonts and other settings. And then along came Font Packs (memory cards with extra fonts), and these weren't cheap. If I recall correctly, a font pack for a HP laser printer cost over $100, and it only contained a few fonts of very limited sizes, and they weren't great anyway - nothing like today's computers that have more fonts than you can poke a stick at in any size you want.
My dad taught me the WD-40 trick back in the 80's. One ribbon would go faint,and it would get sprayed,and put in a plastic bag to sit for a while,and I'd pull another one out. I had 4-5 ribbons that I kept in rotation into the 90's! Way cheaper,when you're a kid printing out everything you can,with Print Shop.
We had the Star NX-10 9-pin printer when I was of C64 age. I wanted that NX-1000C so bad...every issue of Compute!'s Gazette taunted me with it. "Near" Letter Quality! "Color"!
Also appreciated seeing the old Free Pile signs. We're actually considering modifying the "no printers" rule to "no inkjets". The kids are digging the dot matrix lately!
8:41 Twist; what if it's actually _your_ KX-P1124, and you'd sold it to Dunrite at some point while cleaning house and forgot?! 😂
That'd be hilarious, but then I'm actually even happier to have it back :)
I also had the 1124!! Great printer. My favorite dot matrix printer tho was my Star 24 pin color printer, which I still have somewhere...
The KX-P1124i was the printer to have in the early 90s
24:15 aren't there 4 dip switches so 16 compatibility modes?
On a hunch I went digging through my computer morgue, and sure enough I found a Super Graphix that I got in a bundle of other stuff off eBay... but it's only the plain jane model, not a Gold and not a Jr. :(
And in my Great Computer Purge in the late 90's when I moved into a tiny studio apt. I had to ditch my Star NX-1000C (worked beautifully with GEOS) and HP Deskjet 500 (paired with my Amiga 500). Though I did pick up a cheap MPS-803 a couple months ago and it's been working great, and I even found some new ribbons for it. Printed many calendars on it so far.
Oh how I loved GEOS. And F-15 Strike Eagle.
I was gonna go and find my C=64 to parallel interface to share -- and I did -- but it's got zero identifying information on it! Nothing but an FCC compliance tag. It connected to the C=64 serial port and stole 5V (via a single wire) from the cassette port with a card edge connector that itself had an extender so you could still use the cassette. The goodies were conformally wrapped in a fiberglass shell that didn't quite hide the innards, and didn't provide a strain relieve for the data cable, either. It had a 6 position DIP switch the pokes thru the housing, and the parallel connector came out opposite the cable end.
Anyway, that thing provided a C=64 to parallel adaptation. This was then connected to a Smith Corona "Messenger Module" which itself was a parallel printer to typewriter interface/buffer. And that was plugged in to a Smith Corona daisy wheel typewriter input port, resulting in typewriter quality output from Homeword or Paperback Writer, or whatever you liked. And it was LOUD! And that carriage return shook the table it sat on! But amazingly, this super-klugey chain of interfaces worked, and multiple five paragraph themes were produced.
A laser printer doesn't actually print until its done putting the page together in its memory. Try sending a CONTROL-L to the printer, that should make it print the printers buffer
I think I tried that at one point in my experiments, and also made an endless loop printing "HELLO WORLD" or whatever and it never did trigger a print. Thanks, I'll give it another shot at some point.
Yay Xetec!
Kinda under-appreciated in the C64 world, IMO. I did alot of reports in the day using the Fontmaster word processor.
But the big deal with this interface is that big RAM buffer that actually buffers data, and greatly speeds up printing from the slow C64 to the slow SG-10 printer. (The SG-10 could accept data pretty quickly, but not when it was actively printing.)