gloriouscowThis is it. This is what it was all for. All the penposting. The hundreds of dollars of irresponsible eBay purchases.
For this moment.
And it was all worth it.
Also this Tandy CM-II monitor is freaking gorgeous
Tristan
Tristan (@[email protected])
Attached: 1 image Spending my lunch break trying to find the screws for my tandy cm-2. I know they're in an Altoids tin but:
@Tristan no i need them
also can we just appreciate how good smartphone cameras are. this is like a 4 year old samsung phone
this isn't even pro mode or anything i just clicked the zoomy thingy.
This is my first FTG pen to arrive, the FT-411. This model is not listed on FTG's website - I assume it was a budget model specifically made for a company called KidBoard, which made an eponymous edutainment digitizer tablet. They partnered with FTG for a brief foray into lightpens around 1998.
Unlike all of FTG's other pens, the barrel of this pen is plastic, which is cheap and kind of sucks, but at least the barrel is a nice sort of sparkly blue.
The pinout of this pen is - whether by happy accident or deliberate industry cooperation - identical to my Warp Speed pen. I can plug it into the same adapter and use it on the Tandy too. Neat.
You can see the lens assembly here inside the tip switch. The whole tip of it clicks inwards, with the lens moving as you click. There is about 1.5mm of travel.
I have another of FTG's professional series pens in stainless steel on its way - I do not even want to tell you how much I paid for it.
That's probably it for my FTG pen collection - I think FTG really dropped the ball here. They kept the same pen pinout over the entire lifetime of the company, only adding a single optional second button later on.
Once you had a FTG pen you could just upgrade your light pen card as you upgraded your video card - how is FTG not extracting maximum profit by forcing you to buy a new pen each time??? No wonder they went out of business.
Well that and their entire product category going extinct due to the LCD. But besides that.
donated this image to Wikimedia!
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_light_pen_in_use_on_a_CGA_monitor.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_light_pen_in_use_on_a_CGA_monitor.jpg
thoe@thoe I am running out of things to post about them! I will eventually be publishing a huge blog post about them, and uploading a dump of all this shit to archive.org so you can join the pen cult
@[email protected]
I'm regretting selling off my old CRT monitors a long time ago, and I'm actively looking for something, anything, to fill the void left by those sales. I'm not the only one. It seems retro is cool now. Once I can find something that works, I'll join the pen cult. If I can find a pen once I've found a monitor.
I'm regretting selling off my old CRT monitors a long time ago, and I'm actively looking for something, anything, to fill the void left by those sales. I'm not the only one. It seems retro is cool now. Once I can find something that works, I'll join the pen cult. If I can find a pen once I've found a monitor.
@thoe the nice thing about these old old CRTs is that they are tiny so fairly easy to store. I have eaten cakes larger than the CMII in one sitting
@[email protected]
Need to find one before I can store it! Searching for CRT in $MYCITY on our equivalent of Craigslist yields five ads looking for CRTs, one selling an Amiga 500 with an ACA500+ and original 1084S, and someone selling porn on VHS.
Need to find one before I can store it! Searching for CRT in $MYCITY on our equivalent of Craigslist yields five ads looking for CRTs, one selling an Amiga 500 with an ACA500+ and original 1084S, and someone selling porn on VHS.
paulrickards@gloriouscow Love following along as your travel down the lightpen rabbit hole. I had a McPen for the Commodore when I was young. It literally felt like the future to touch it to the screen and make things happen. Wasn't a lot of software that used it though. It came with a disk and some programs, notably one that copied files between disks but pointing at them from a list. Super cool.
@paulrickards Finding an actual, singular decent application that isn't just a toy or a slapped-on feature for the light pen is deeply satisfying. And the thing is I basically stumbled across it at the last minute.
I wanted to do a video on the light pen, but honestly was feeling a little bad about it because running through a calibration utility is not exactly the most exciting thing.
@paulrickards This is of course a very PC centric focus, as its the computer I grew up with. Light pens for the PC's light pen interface have basically been close to mythical. Even a few years ago some avid collectors had never even seen one.
@gloriouscow True, but calibration is part of using one and worthy of explanation. Imagine if we had to recalibrate touch screens today.
In theory, drawing applications are a natural extension. In practice, it was extremely frustrating.
@paulrickards Even without a light pen card, this is actually surprisingly usable. Freehand painting sucks, but since this program lets me drag things around to fine tune placement, I can get about as good a result as you're gonna get out of a 320x200 graphic anyway.
It sure as shit beats MicroGrafx's method of nudging stuff around with tiny little arrows
@gloriouscow As far as C64 lightpen apps go, there is PlatoTerm from a few years ago. Notably, it supported all sorts of input devices, including a lightpen!
@paulrickards is this yours? may I use this photo?
@gloriouscow Yes and yes.
BTW, that's not the McPen in the picture. That's another type, a little fancier actually. It had a switch in the tip so you could tap the screen to push the "fire" button of the joystick port, presumably. The McPen had no such function.
@paulrickards Yeah, I have seen both types. The industry definitely settled on tip switches.
lol, the "industry". After the 80's it was pretty much just FTG .
FTG did eventually add a second button on the side for right-clicking.
The C64 supports two light pen buttons, my Inkwell pen has two, neither on the tip!
by all accounts i pretty much have one example of every light pen card FTG made. They switched to external light pen interfaces at some point , but for some reason those are always listed for $200 or more without even including the pen so frack that
Thalia Archibald@paulrickards @gloriouscow That doesn’t look like a Commodore 64?
Space Hobo@thalia @paulrickards @gloriouscow Ah, it seems you may not be Keeping Up With The Commodore! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pJRg5Ncxd0&t=30s
Commodore Commercial C64 & SX 64 (1983, 1984)
@thalia @spacehobo @gloriouscow Yep! It was my C64 proper when I was young. 10 years ago I modded one to add a second floppy drive, making a DX-64!
fraggle@paulrickards @gloriouscow just want to chime in and say I also appreciate all the light pen stuff. When I was a kid I remember occasionally reading about them in older books about tech, and I think there was a QBASIC API for them, they always seemed so cool and mysterious, perhaps partly because I never had a chance to try one. I've still never used one but it's cool to at least see others experimenting with them
@fraggle @paulrickards i'm glad to hear this. i was worried it was sort of wearing a bit thin, but I think there is legitimately interesting history here that hadn't been dug up yet, and I kept finding new amusing things.
penguin42@gloriouscow Hang on, your plans must be more evil than that - you've got a whole pile of pens and cards haven't you?
