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.
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.
@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!
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!