Barry Miles puts more colour into his Commodore machines with a dot-matrix printer that produces eight-colour graphics using a multi-coloured ribbon

One drawback to owning a Commodore computer is finding a printer that is fully compatible. Commodore has, at last, brought out an eight-colour dot matrix printer that produces all the CBMSCII characters and performs screen dumps, for £395.95.

The machine comes in an attractive black case, complete with connecting cables and a set of smoked plastic paper feed lids.

Getting the printer going is simple; just install the paper, plug in the multi-colour ribbon cartridge, connect the cable up to your Vic or C64, and switch on.

The printer is sleek and has a good solid feel to it, weighing 5.5 kilos and measuring 48cm by 35.5cm by 14cm.

The apparent lack of control switches is soon solved: the flush top conceals the paper feed and power switches of the touch sensitive kind. Users of other printers may be surprised at the inability to switch the 801 off- and on-line, and to carry out a form feed. There are no DIP switches to change the printer's operation, so this is a simple workhorse - versatility was not a major design aim.

Another difference between this and most other printers, is the absence of a paper out warning indicator. However, just before the paper is about to run out, the power light flashes continuously and the printing stops. Since the Commodore 801 is designed to be used with Commodore machines only, it does not really need the same flexibility as other printers. The rear of the printer is pretty light on connections; there are simply two of the Commodore serial pseudo IEEE DIN sockets. A welcome feature, however, is the switch that allows you to change the device number to 4, 5 or 6.

The MCS801 allows you to use paper from 11cm to 25cm inches wide on its tractor feed or roller mechanisms. The matrix of the print head is 8 x 8, so descenders are rather short.

The colour range is black, cyan, purple, magenta, red, yellow, green and, of course, white. The line spacing is programmable in steps of 1/20th of an inch with a default of 1/16th inch.

The 802 is rather slow with a rated speed of 38cps. In practice, as with most printers, this is something of an overestimate. The printing is also somewhat noisy but the good fit of the lid reduces the noise to an acceptable level.

The review documentation, A Friendly Introduction To Your MCS801 Printer, also bore the perturbing legend Preliminary. Further investigation made me long for the final version: an all-too typical quotation was:

"Scan mode is mostly used for high resolution graphics screen hard copy. When this mode is used, many data manipulation is needed, so Basic language sequence is too slow. Therefore when using hires-screen hardcopy, program should be written in machine language. However, begginer's don't know how to make machine language program. So attached demo disk include some hires screen hard copy program example. Hires screen is highly dependent on the computer, and the computer has many screen modes, demo programs are only samples." Yes, well.

The machine functions well and the paper remains on the tractors with the lid on, allowing the sheets to be torn off easily.

The use of the colour modes is fairly straight forward. Send CHR$(20) followed by CHR$(n) where n is a colour number between 0 and 7. The printer continues with the last specified colour until you change it.

Commodore uses secondary addressing to allow some control codes to the printer. Opening a file with the appropriate secondary address and sending down the codes enables the various printer functions to be controlled.

A number of control options are available: the tab setting of the print head can be done in dot increments, and it is possible to repeat both 7 and 8-bit graphics. The print quality is good with the colour reasonably reproduced though you must take care to turn off the ink transfer from unused colours on your ribbon.

The machine comes with a demo disk that contains the source code for colour screen demos. For the sake of speed, it is pretty well essential that such programs are in machine code.

The MCS801 is a good workhorse colour printer without frills. If colour and the ability to print Commodore graphics is important and you want compatibility with the Commodore 64 or Vic, this is a good buy.

Features: 3/5
Documentation: 2/5
Performance: 4/5
Overall Value: 4/5