The Amber 2400 is a plain-paper dot matrix printer costing £105.24 including interface cable, paper, postage and VAT. The paper rolls are 2¼in. wide, which allows up to 24 characters to be printed in normal mode. The printer can be used in serial or parallel mode with a variety of computers but, sadly, it is extremely difficult to use with a ZX-81.

'As the printer draws its power from the ZX-81 power supply that has caused problems due to the heavier consumption'

Amber is the first to concede that the interface provided is not the complete package you need for use on ZX-81. The main reason is that the driving software is not provided in an EPROM as it is on the other interfaces mentioned, but has to be loaded separately from a cassette.

That software has the task of converting the non-standard internal character codes into ASCII and also checking the status of the printer. It is not possible to obtain listings or a screen copy. There are, however, routines to allow the printer to be used with a Spectrum, which is much easier to interface, since it uses ASCII codes.

Reference Number :

Date Published : 1982

Manufacturer : Amber Controls Ltd

Platform : Amber 2400