I note from EUG #53 that Raymond Morgan wishes to print with his Elk, so I thought I'd send along my experiences.

Some time ago I bought a Star LC100 colour printer. This is a 9 pin dot matrix printer and I paid around £100 for it. I believe this printer is still available and they are now cheaper. I haven't used it with my Elk for a while but recall it pretty much printed, text anyway, straight from the box; once put into Epson-compatible mode.

Just about any Epson dot matrix printer driver will enable it to print graphics in Black and White. I can't remember which I used now, but all the control characters, switch settings, etc are listed comprehensively in the back of the manual that came with it, and so anyone with such knowledge on what to do with these should also be able to 'do colour'. I've never got to that stage myself though.

More recently, I bought an Epson Stylus Colour 600 inkjet printer. This prints text with no problems whatsoever. I think I may have had to set *FX 6,0 to stop it all printing on the same line though.

Regarding graphics, both printers printed good quality black and white graphics from the built-in Printer Dump within the Stop Press 64 package. The only difference being the Epson requires a slight alteration to line 140.

I don't actually use my Elk a great deal these days. I do most things '8 bit' by emulation on my Acorn RISC PC or A3010. I have a version of View which runs in the Desktop (Not by emulation!) and this requires a BBC Type Printer Driver to make it print, as it prints from within the application, not via RISC OS. I have successfully printed to the Epson, using a driver called EULQ100, which I found somewhere. I'm not entirely sure what it's supposed to be for, but it works, so long as FX6,0 is set. (I have a boot file for View, which sets this every time View is run.)

The EPSON 600 is no longer made. I can't say whether these methods would work with more recent EPSON inkjets, perhaps somebody else can or perhaps find someone who's got one and borrow it to try.

Anyway hopefully this may have been of some use. If I can help further, just let me know.

John Crane