MicroDesign Plus

[ComSoft6128]

“Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.”
― H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds  1898

This was drawn by my brother in 1984. It shows a Martian fighting machine destroying a small boat before manoeuvring to attack nearby British warships. The design of the tripod is taken from the 1978 album cover of Jeff Wayne's The War of the Worlds.
This is the high resolution strip format - 4/5 strips make up one full A4 portrait page. The 5 files that make up this particular page total 98K in size. Strip format is possibly the highest resolution ever seen on the CPC and when combined with a good printer can produce excellent results.
The original drawing is long gone but because it was scanned and converted in 92 this MD+ file still exists on CPC disc.  If printed off and then photocopied up to A3 size this makes a good poster - stepping ("the Jaggies") is barely visible.

[ComSoft6128]

This is the modified version of the previous design, from 93. Only two copies were made, one for myself and one for my then business partner in Kent. It was created during the development of, the sadly never finished, MicroDesign 2 CPC. At that time, 92/93, Stop Press was our only commercial competition. The text on the "foot" of the Tripod is the MD Hitech font, the text on the boat is the standard default MD writing font. Printed using the Star LC-10 printer. To examine this properly I would recommend downloading it.

[ComSoft6128]

Poster for office use from 1990. The large fonts (approximately 72 point) used in this file are from the MD Extra disc released by Siren Software in 1988. Landscape format. Printed using the Star LC-10 9-pin printer set for 240 DPI (Quadruple density) output. MD+ may be the only CPC program that was capable of this but possibly Qualitas Plus or the Brunword MK4 module also had this as an option. Possibly.

[GUNHED]

Don't want to get off-topic. However... which kind of printers do you use?
Me? I use the HP Deskjet 500 with the CPC, it's an ink printer with very nice resolution :-) Ok, had to write my own driver, but it works :-)

[ComSoft6128]

Hi GUNHED,

All of the hardcopy displayed in this thread are scans from the originals from 20+ years ago. Each was stored in its own plastic sleeve and these sleeves were kept in two large folders.
During my CPC years (88-99) I had three printers: Amstrad DMP 2160 - adequate but not great, the Star LC-10 - excellent output + very reliable and the Canon BJ10-EX - superb (up to 300 DPI) output and much quicker than the LC-10.
Interesting that you still have a working printer, I made the stupid (very) mistake of throwing out the Canon about 10 years ago. This is something I now bitterly regret, especially as it was still working. I no longer have a printer for the 6128 and 6128 Plus, Bollocks! 
When did you write your driver? I never knew anyone that used the Deskjet with the CPC during the nineties.

Cheers,

Peter


EDIT 16/8/18.

The following links on these printers are available here:

http://www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/Amstrad/Schneider_Printer_Models

http://www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/Star_Printers

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=hqQJaNzN9IcC&pg=PA331&lpg=PA331&dq=canon+bj+10ex+review&source=bl&ots=w8DekBJoYb&sig=y0-CAZ1ysqFWp0L0YE7yZI5Qhyo&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiD5ZfY_PDcAhXCMewKHRR0CF84FBDoATAEegQIBhAB#v=onepage&q=canon%20bj%2010ex%20review&f=false
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=hqQJaNzN9IcC&pg=PA331&lpg=PA331&dq=canon+bj+10ex+review&source=bl&ots=w8DekBJoYb&sig=y0-CAZ1ysqFWp0L0YE7yZI5Qhyo&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiD5ZfY_PDcAhXCMewKHRR0CF84FBDoATAEegQIBhAB#v=onepage&q=canon%20bj%2010ex%20review&f=false

http://www.hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?hw=308

https://techcrunch.com/2010/05/04/gadgets-of-days-gone-by-hp-deskjet-500/?guccounter=1

[GUNHED]

Oh dear ... got that Deskjet 500 in the 90ies and it was very cheap, I got a discount from a friend, so it was only about $1000 (back the day that was cheap!). Since it's not Epson compatible without an extra cartridge (which provides lesser quality then HP mode) I decided to write own drivers for HP Level "something" printer language. That was for Prowort and G-Paint, also some other stuff.
Back the day every printer was delivered with a nice handbook which did explain all the control codes, theresfore it was relatively easy to write a driver. Protext (CP/M version) actually helps to define control codes and make it very easy too.

Of course if I need to print something today I use the printer on the PC most of the time because I need to save the ink cartridges for the HP (they don't make em any longer I guess).

Hard to get a parallel or serial printer anyway :-//

[VincentGR]

I have a Canon i560 with parallel support that worked fine with my Amiga before the head got faulty 

[ComSoft6128]

Deskjet 500 - not a cheap printer at all but marvellous printed output.
In the local government department that I worked in in the early nineties I think we only had two in the entire (large) head office, the rest of the department had to make do with whatever rattling 9 pin (later 24 pin) machines were going cheap that week.

On the subject of printer drivers, I know that Creative Technology wrote drivers for the 500 for Microdesign 2 and MicroDesign 3 on the PCW as did Locomotive software for LocoScript. Arnor may have written one for PCW Protext but I'm not sure. I have what I think is one of the later versions of CPM Protext somewhere so will have a look at it one day.

Cheers.

Peter

[tjohnson]

Wow I remember the HP Deskjet 500 my father bought one, it could print colour but you had to remove the black cartridge to install the colour which them made black by mixing all the colours together.  It was great compared to the previous 9 pin dot matrix we had.  By today's standards very very slow, but built to last.

[ComSoft6128]

I guess this file dates from 92.  64K landscape format.  Rombo Vidi again, images are converted mode 2 screens.  Printed using the Star LC-10, the amount of ink used in this type of design (large black areas) would rapidly wear out the printer ribbon. 
This poster probably took longer to print than it took to make!

[ComSoft6128]

Another design from a MD+ user. 92/93(?). There could be a cover letter somewhere but if so I haven't found it yet. This file might be related to the development of the VideoMaster unit when we were looking at producing something that would improve on the abysmal performance of the MP2. Apologies for the quality but it dates from 25+ years ago and I had to scan it at 200 DPI as the 300 DPI file was too large to display in the Forum. Probably best to download it and use Windows photo viewer.

[VincentGR]

DAMN 


This is goooood!

[ComSoft6128]

All credit to the MD+ user that created this design. It's not a scan. Whoever created this copied the info from CWTA, manually typed the text and then created the graphic element himself using MD. As the text handling options in MD were poor and in MD+ only slightly better, this would have taken quite some time.  The quickest way would have been to write the text using any CPC word processor, save as ASCII and them import into MD+ using the file conversion menu. The last stage would involve merging the text and graphics components on the layout or design pages. Not a 5 minute job.

[VincentGR]

I know, I tried to type in there and it was a nightmare.

[GUNHED]

Now I really want to do something with MD!!! Did MD2 ever get out?

[ComSoft6128]

Unfortunately not GUNHED. Alan Sugar's goons came calling and made my business partner an "offer he couldn't refuse" - nothing to do with a horse's head in a bed(!) - but the more mundane task of writing the word processor for the ill fated PcW16. 
This meant that development on MD2 CPC ceased abruptly.
As you can imagine, my thoughts on this, even today, are emotive.
To be quite frank - if Amstrad had made a similar offer to me, I would also have went their way, but lacking the necessary skill set (programming) that was never going to happen.
Bottom line - Blame Amstrad!

I still have the Beta test versions of MD2 CPC and will, one day, have a good look at them but at the moment I have different priorities.

What I can tell you about MD2 CPC is that it had full typesetting (including autoflow), direct import of PCW MD2 files and we were looking to utilise the 256K memory packs that were then still available to increase the resolution of the MD page.

Cheers,

Peter

[GUNHED]

The 'Like' is for you post, not for what happens.
I'm really sorry to hear. 

[ComSoft6128]

It's cool, it was a long time ago and I don't hold grudges against Alan Sugar or his goons (said thru gritted teeth)

[robcfg]

I’d make a dump or copy of the MD2 disks, just in case... 

[ComSoft6128]

Good point Rob,
At the moment the disks (12) are kept in a cupboard well away from any sources of magnetism but backing them up is the sensible option.

[ComSoft6128]

Clip art converted to MD format.
These files are either from Stop Press or one of the clip art discs released by Goldmark Systems.

[ComSoft6128]

More designs from MD+ users. These were normally printed off at 1/4 scale to maximise the number that could be displayed per page. The hardcopy was then stored in folders to remind me what the files on disc were. The 8 character Amsdos file name limit often resulted in file names like this - cstmr1 (instead of customer1) - not the easiest to understand when looked at months or years later, so keeping a hardcopy record was the best option.
Irfanview was used to modify this file as the original scanned file was too large.  Again, I would suggest downloading the file to examine. Also, does anyone know what the function of a H.R. Interface is?

[ComSoft6128]

Aside from the slightly pompous title of this design (isn't 27 year old hindsight wonderful), I am quite happy with this file. All the dense background pixel material has been removed leaving three strong images for use.
As ever, these are mode 2 converted to MD format.
Background to the Scottish artist, Peter Howson, can be found here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Howson

And while looking thru his website this morning I found the original 1991 Scottish Television programme the images were grabbed from!
Video is here (scroll to the bottom of the page):

https://peterhowson.co.uk/works/

[ComSoft6128]

Recommended reading.

http://www.riscos.com/support/users/budgetdtp/chap10.htm#l0092

This chapter on printers is from the 1992 book "Budget DTP ON RISC OS". Although the book is for the Acorn Archimedes most of the information is still applicable to the CPC and to MD+ in particular and is well worth checking out.

Cheers,

Peter



 

[ComSoft6128]

More converted clip art from Stop Press or Goldmark Systems. As these were converted over 25 years ago one or two pieces may have came from other sources (PD libraries) but in 2018 I have no way of knowing which, if any.  Microsoft Paint was used to remove the name of the person in the banner in the bottom centre of the page as apparently they still live at that address.