gloriouscowHnng.
Normies will never understand the ecstasy of imaging a never before imaged floppy.
I'm going to need to build a 486 now, won't I...
Everything on the PXL-380 CGA/EGA light pen card is a standard component. All 74 series logic.
It looks like the card is not actually doing cursor position calculation, it's just running two binary counters that reset on hsync and vsync which the driver can read and do the math in software.
Its also a two layer board. So the good news is we can make new light pen boards!
The PXL-395 is clearly a different beast with its custom VLSI CPU.
It surprises me that a light pen company had the cash to burn on custom silicon.
These cards have other potential applications, if you needed hardware retriggerable counters on an old PC for some reason.
gmc@gloriouscow Interesting. Can we alo make new light pens??
@gmc in theory yes. If I find a pen i can easily open and trace out the PCB, we could 3d print them
What a coincidence. Randomly clicking through some byte magazines on archive.org, and I end up here:
Lockpick Extreme@gmc @gloriouscow Way back when, I built a simple light pen for my Atari 400. It needed a cathode ray TV and some code (I wrote in Basic).
Nazo@gloriouscow Yes! Do it! You need a 486! I am not in any way biased because they corresponded to an era of PCs that I really really loved and in many ways miss. No bias at all in my statements I promise.
@nazokiyoubinbou Its funny I never owned a 486. We went directly from a 386DX-40 to a P90. That was a hell of an upgrade, let me tell you.
@gloriouscow I know the feeling. I sort of did a jump like that in that my first PC was a 286 (a hand-me-down) in a time when the whole world had 486 systems and so I couldn't even run half of what I wanted to run on it since so many things required 386 enhanced mode even to run. Then, suddenly I jump to a 486 at more than 2x the clock rate (so like 4x the actual processor speed I guess?) and could just suddenly run everything of the time on it. 😆