A few weeks ago (issue 88) you published a letter from a reader enquiring about a user group for the Sharp PC 5000.
Such a group is in the process of being formed, and interested PC 5000 users - or indeed any users of Sharp pocket computers - should contact Mr. Roland Saam, 149 Gloucester Road, London SW7 4TH, who will be glad to help.
Your reader and other 5000 users may be interested to know that there is an undocumented command in the machine's GW Basic. LCOPY is fully supported by the built-in printer (used, incidentally, for this letter) in all three modes. Thus:
LCOPY 0 ... prints a screen dump over the full paper width
LCOPY 1 ... prints a dot for dot screen dump
LCOPY 2 ... prints the contents of the screen as text in the mode currently selected for printing.
Of these, LCOPY 1 needs a little more explanation. The PC 5000's screen has a horizontal resolution of 640 dots, while the printer produces 1,280 dots horizontally. Therefore a graphic printed with the LCOPY 1 command is effectively reproduced at half size.
The printer is in fact very versatile, and, although using a matrix technique is capable of very high resolution.
12th January 1985
