Re: Need manuals and/or software for:

[calibrator@freenet.de]

Steven Hirsch wrote:
>
> I'm doing a comprehensive inventory of my A2 collection and have tripped over
> two cards that I know nothing about:
>
> - Fingerprint
>
> It's not a GSi model, but aside from that I know nothing about it.  Would
> appreciate any pointers to documentation and/or support software.

Hi Steven,

I have the following review text of the "Fingerprint Plus" card.
It apparently contains some OCR errors so caution is advised but it's
better than nothing.

bye
Marcus

---


Below is a review of this item by The Austrialian Apple Review from
1987:

At its most fundamental, the FingerPrint Plus is a printer interface
board. At its most functional, it is a Grappler plus emulator, an
Apple
Super Serial emulator and a Wildcard emulator, all at the same time.

The Fingerprint Plus is a multifunction card so the dollars spent on
this do not just fill a hole in your Apple, they do so very cost
effectively, both in value and in reducing the population explosion in
your slots. The card is a printer interface. I used it with DOS, CP/M
and Pascal. After an initial hiccup, the FingerPrint performed exactly
as the Grappler I had pulled out. The hiccup came about as a result of
my reading the manual too closely. The manual, which is about 30 pages
long, lists about forty printers (including colour printers) which are
supported. And, before the FingerPrint can work, a set of switches
must
be set. Now, the printer I use for drafts and graphics is a Super 5,
which is set up for the IBM pc. However, without any playing with dip
switches, it works equally well hooked to the Apple. So, the selection
seemed obvious, 'IBM - Epson Compatible'.

The results from this selection were anything but awe inspiring. But,
playing with the switches and selection just 'Epson' fixed the
problem.
It appears the list of supported printers is larger than the
FingerPrint
makers knew. If I was to make any comment at this point, it would be
that the interface will give you quite some flexibility in the type of
printer you attach, and so would be worth purchasing as the printer
interface of your choice. While such flexibility is not important when
only pushing text through the printer, it does become critical when it
comes to graphics and the utilisation of all printer features. And,
there is nothing to say you won't buy a second printer or replace the
one you have.

But, the FingerPrint does offer much more.

Trailing out from the interface are two cables. One goes naturally to
the printer, while the other goes to the front of your Apple. At the
end
of this is a small adhesive-backed pad with a fingerprint embellished
on
it. This is the switch which interrupts your Apple's processing and
allows you to do screen prints.

This is one of the nice features found standard on MS DOS pcs. By
hitting two keys on the keyboard (SHIFT and PRT SC), the screen goes
to
the printer. Great when playing with disk directories or getting hard
copy of a section of a spreadsheet easily. With FingerPrint, this
feature becomes available on the Apple. Pressing the switch, gives you
a
menu as shown in Figure 1.

Unlike the Wildcard, this menu only temporarily suspends the running
of
your program. You return at the point where you left, without any
adverse results. For example, Figure 2 shows a scene from Zaxxon (one
of
the favourite games), and play continued after the print. The old way
of
getting these screens was to invest in a Wildcard. This great little
piece of hardware would stop any program allow you to boot a disk with
a
normal DOS or wander through the monitor. If all was well, the
graphics
pages would be intact and could be then saved to disk with something
like:

BSAVE PICI, A$20001$2000

and then printed from disk, or through the Grappler.

FingerPrint has three advantages over the Wildcard. The first has been
mentioned - you don't need to exit your program if you don't really
want
to. The second is that it will print a mix of lo-res graphics and
text,
which is fiddly to do with the Apple. And, the third is that you don't
need to know that A$2000 is a starting address of HGRl in RAM and L
$2000
is the length of the page you pages with DISPLAY before doing anything
else.

Apart from printing graphics, the Finger Print will dump text from a
standard 40 column screen or an 80 column using the Apple 80 column
card
or want to save. All you need to do is a Videx board. I was unable to
test the point to PRINT, or store to disk. Your Apple 80 column card,
but according to even have the option of looking at the the manual,
screen dumps from AppleWriter (and MousePaint) are straightforward.

But, there is still more. The interface has both a serial and parallel
port, and these can be used simultaneously with two printers going at
the same time, or as selected, or, the serial can be used for other
peripherals. The manual suggest one such item which can be hung off is
a
modem and describes the connection to five types of modems, including
Hayes. Again I was unable to test this feature of the card because I
have an accoustic coupler with a connector different to the one
required
on the card. According to the literature supplied with the package,
this
is not a worry as a few dollars more will rectify. And, if you already
have a serial printer, my advice would be to look at the FingerPrint
when considering communications, because if your modem can be hooked
to
the serial card driving your printer, then you could easily justify
hooking your printer to the FingerPrint and capitalising on all its
features.

If it isn't apparent, I definitely liked the card. At around $210 with
a
cable and self test disk, it is not expensive and yet offers a wide
range of very useful features. To buy for some of these features alone
-
like the 'print screen' facility - may not be worth the expense. To
print high scores, or Battlefront screens to ponder at leisure, also
won't justify the dollars for me. However if you are buying a parallel
printer, don't let the salesperson talk you into anything less for an
interface, even if it looks a bit more expensive. Or if you are
considering hooking Apples together or talking to bulletin boards then
this card could easily be considered instead of a serial, and the
print
features become a bonus.

For me the best aspect of the card was that it freed two slots. My II+
is full - even slot 7. Putting in the FingerPrint Plus instead of my
Grappler immediately gave me back two additional slots - the Wildcard
and the serial.