Commodore 1520 supplies + programs

Hello.

I recently bought a Commodore 1520 plotter printer from eBay. I was lucky: none of the gears were split (two were loose around the axis' but a drop of glue fixed that) and it had unopened set of pens with it! I did some light repairs (cleaning, re-lubricating etc) and now everything seems to be working.

This is a cute printer: comically small paper (I have now small pieces of rolled listings around my desk) and the mechanism doesn't really fill it's user with confidence of its reliability. Also the way it fills coloured areas is funny as it keeps clicking around :) Also before I fixed one of the slipping gears, the patterns got distorted in various ways as the paper wouldn't roll up and down as it should have.

I read several threads regarding the pens. I have one full working set and two non-working sets. I have been trying to revive the non-working pens by heating them, keeping them in isopropanol and other stuff but still no go. Any tips on those? (I am over-cautiously protecting the working pens, I remove them from the printer and re-cap immediately after I am done printing).

Also does anyone know a source for the paper rolls for this printer? I have almost used the roll I got with the printer :) Original part number is 1520030-01, width 114 mm (4.5"), thickness 70 microns, roll diameter 70 mm (as stated in the manual).

After running one of the programs (that didn't finish correctly due to a spelling error in closing code) the printer finished with the power light blinking. There is no mention of this in the user's manual, what was it trying to tell me? After a serial-bus reset it was fine.

For all you fellow 1520-users out there, I have compiled a .d64 with the demo programs from the printers user's manual. (I took a PDF-version of the manual, OCR'd it and put the stuff into a d64 file. Then I manually went thrue each program on my C64+1520 and tested them). The manual's listings have several errors and I couldn't get three of the programs working properly, those are marked with X on the file name. Perhaps some later revision of the manual have those programs fixed? I also put in three demos from a review artcile of this printer from a Finnish Poke&Peek magazine (3/1985, here: http://www.ntrautanen.fi/computers//commodore/poke_peek/poke_peek_8503.pdf).

The disk image is here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/39319567/CBM1520_programs.d64

Cheers,
Ville L.


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