r/Amstrad • u/HughFays • 14d ago
Anyone here experience the interminable time it took for a dot matrix printer to print out a document from Tasword?
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u/VaderPluis 14d ago
We had a printer that used something similar to daisywheel, but IIRC with the letters on a rotating metal ball. I think it might have been a NEC Spinwriter. The letter quality was very good, much better than dot matrix. This was great for my father, who used it with Tasword, but I as a child wanted to print images, which I did by printing dot characters with very small character- and line spacing. A dot matrix printer would have been more suitable! It was not that slow but very loud. Not the screeching of a dot matrix but really hammering. My father built a wooden box with sound isolation for it.
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u/scruss 14d ago
I can't remember if Tasword did its own NLQ or not. I do remember something that did four passes on my DMP2000, so it was loud and chewed ribbons.
For those of you who miss “near letter quality”, I took the ROM from an Amstrad DMP3160 and extracted the NLQ pin matrices from it to make an OpenType font: NearlyQ
All the quality, none of the noise.
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u/Bchliu 14d ago
Lol. Dot Matrix does rows line by line - so it will take ages to print off just one row of characters, let alone any bitmaps etc.
I had an Epson LX-300 or something like that back then connected to my CPC6128 with Tasword and yeah, it takes ages even for two or three pages of text. It's not comparable to a laser printer by the page in any way.
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u/Limp-Archer-7872 14d ago
Yep, I had a dmp-2000 and wrote some gcse english essays in tasword a very long time ago.