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Commodore MPS 1230 Dot Matrix Printer under GNU/Linux
Hi,
I used to have a Commodore 64 with an MPS 1230 printer. 25 years later the printer is still working, and I wondered whether it could work with a modern GNU/Linux distribution, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Bionic Beaver amd64 in this case. Long story short, with the right settings it works perfectly! So I wanted to share my experience, hoping it would be useful to those who still have this printer. Note that you will probably need a USB to Parallel port adapter and the computer won’t recognize automagically the printer. Firstly, plug your printer to the appropriate port (in my case, a USB port through the Parallel adapter) and go to the control center of your computer then choose to add a printer (System Administration Printers with the MATE desktop). Select "unknown" and click Forward, then keep the default option (choose a printer from the database) and select IBM and click Forward. A list will be displayed, there select ProPrinterII, then click Forward and after setting the name, click Apply. You’re done with the settings on the computer. Secondly, press and hold Line Feed and Form Feed on the MPS 1230 and turn it on. The machine will enter the configuration mode and ask you a bunch of questions. As it says, press LF to confirm a choice, FF to change and to end press Local. Here are the settings I chose to get everything working: Interface: Parallel Printer emulated in Parallel and serial Commodo Proprinter Character set in parallel mode: USA/UK Character set in Commodore mode: USA/UK Open Mode: 4 P.C. Commands, 5 Commodore Commands Automatic Sheet Feeder: Yes Double Strike Printing: Bidirectional Character Resolution: Draft Character Spacing: 10 Enable D.L.L. : No Line Feed: LF = LF Carriage Return: CR = CR Paper end detection: Yes Line Spacing: 1/6 Slashed Zero: Yes DC1/DC3 Procedu No Form Length: 10 Skip Over Perforation (BOF): 0 Bidirectional B.I.M. : Yes Proportional Spacing: No Character Length: 8 bits Would you like to store these parameters? Yes Changes Executed You may find more information in the user manual of the printer, and some of the settings above probably won’t interfere much, like the slashed 0 or the character set as foomatic will handle the charset and all the rest. But just in case, I wrote down the entire configuration (I have to fiddle a bit to filter out useless settings, but that’s for later). Now your printer should be ready to print whatever you like, you can start with a test page. As for the supplies, 11*24 cm fan fold or continuous form paper is easy to find, and for the ink ribbon it seems that the Olivetti 82556 Nylon black does the trick, but I have yet to try it as a replacement of the original ribbon. Well, that’s it. Hope this will be useful to others. Needless to say feel free to correct my mistakes. Message licensed under Creative Commons Zero. |
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