Why Nasprint-80?

by D. Munday

To begin with, what is Nasprint-80 or, to give it the full title, Nascom Printer Drive and Formatting Package for the Epson MX80? Basically, it is an attempt to direct the printed outputs from all of the standard Nascom software, eg. NASDIS, ZEAP, etc, through a common printer drive routine, from which the text or listings etc. can be printed and formatted into pages as required. The most important criterium being ease-of-use while giving it maximum flexibility. But, before giving a detailed description of what Nasprint 80 can do, it may be of interest to a number of people to know how the program began and was subsequently developed.

Like many people. I expect, who built their Nascom 2 and eventually got it working, there was a problem of what to do with it after the Martians had finally invaded Earth. I decided that it would be worthwhile to equip myself with a printer and, as it happened, an Olivetti TE 300 teleprinter came my way. With small hardware addition to the printer, I was able to write a short program to drive the printer through the Nascom PIO and was quite delighted when some totally illegible garbage was printed, which, incidently, was different to the garbage that was typed in. Still, it was a start. In fact, that was the beginning of Nasprint-80, although I was unaware of it at the time.

The teleprinter drive routine was my first attempt at machine code programming although I had purchased a copy of ZEAP, NASDIS and DEHUG some time earlier with the intention of finding out what it was all about having grown tired of using BASIC. My only machine code experience prior to this was finding the bugs in a certain games program, O***llo, published by one of the national mags. So, armed with a couple of boots and some articles on assembly language programming, I set about writing program that would allow me to output listings and text from any of the standard software with the relevant output addresses being changed automatically.

Well, initially, progress was painfully slow with even the most simple tasks taking sometimes days to achive, only to give way to a better idea later on. A great deal of knowledge was gained from the assembly listings provided with the Nascom software, without which, I am sure you would not be reading this now. Unfortunately, the program’s development stopped frequently because of problems with the teleprinter, it not doing as it was told. Eventually, after about 6 months, it gave way to an Epson MX80 as I was spending all my time keeping the printer working, ultimately failing. However, by this time the program had developed to about 1k, half of that being tables and option menus, but the basic framework was formed.

Briefly, on executing the program, the user was presented