MPS series

MPS 803

The MPS series is a series of needle and Unihammer printers from Commodore International , largely manufactured by Seikosha as an OEM .

MPS stands for M atrix P rinting S erial. Serial because of the bus system via which they are connected to the computers; in addition, there is also an MPP series for the P arallelen IEC bus of CBM Calculator series . Printing is carried out with an arrangement of needles that represent the fonts to be printed on the paper in the form of a matrix determined by the number of needles. Devices of the MPS series were available with different vertical resolutions. The simplest had only seven points, which led to the lack of true descenders . The print image was very jittery and difficult to read due to the lack of a print baseline.

Some of the early models in the series only mastered unidirectional printing, in which the printing unit only prints when moving from left to right and only performs a carriage return on the way back . However, later models also mastered bidirectional printing - they were able to put characters on paper both in the forward and backward movements and were therefore almost twice as fast. The disadvantage was often a horizontal offset between adjacent lines.

Devices that had a suffix C (for color ) in their name could also produce color prints by using a textile ribbon with four colors. The four components of the subtractive color mixture were applied one after the other within one line. That is, a line was printed up to four times.

The main advantage of the MPS printers was that they could be connected to the serial CBM bus of the Commodore home computers (including the C64 , C128 ) without a special interface . They also mastered the Commodore-specific version of the ASCII character set. The printers were usually given device number 4 on the Commodore bus. Some models could also be switched to another device number between 4 and 7, so that several printers of this series could be connected at the same time.

The MPS series included the following printers:

• MPS 801 (tractor drive for continuous paper )
• MPS 802 (first under the name 1526, tractor drive for continuous paper)
• MPS 803 (single sheet feeder, optional tractor drive for continuous paper)
• MPS 1000
• MPS 1200 (and MPS 1200P)
• MPS 1224C
• MPS 1230
• MPS 1250 (with 2 interfaces, serial and parallel)
• MPS 1270 / MPS 1270A
• MPS 1280 (for the Australian market)
• MPS 1500 C
• MPS 1550 C
• MPS 2000
• MPS 2000 C
• MPS 2010
• MPS 2020 (for the Australian market)
• MPS 2030
• MPS 2100

Models

• 

  Commodore MPS 801

• 

  Commodore MPS 802

• 

  Commodore MPS 803

• 

  Commodore MPS 1000

Web links

•  Italian Nastri stampanti Commodore: table with identical printers
• Australian Commodore and Amiga Review, The - Volume 5 Issue 11 (1988-11) (Saturday Magazine) (AU) (November 1988)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ MPS 803 on c64-wiki.de
2. ↑ MPS 1200 on c64-wiki.de
3. ↑ MPS 1250 on c64-wiki.de