Thursday, December 11, 2014

Flirting with "Touch and type"

I was very interested to control The Ace with Lightpen...
like "Touch and get control over all". Sadly I must to say that I did all possible to make it real also on LCD display, my HP2025 which has balanced reactions to Lightpen Demo, but working, now looks like impossible. I knew that LCD is not CRT and these two devices have different method to displaying picture. For now I'm balancing at Q which is for me important if work on this feature or throw it to scrap...

So, I'm asking you: Have yet users for displaying C128 desktops CRT or LCD monitors? Is count of CRT so high to work around "Touch and go"?

Really I'm finished Drawer for IDEA, now I'm beginning to create Font Editor which allows to edit standard Commodore fonts for VIC (8×8 pixels), VDC (8×8 up to 8×16 pixels) - this means fixed width and proportional fonts of maximal width or height 16 pixels, each character can have different width, but height is used for whole font. Of course in case of proportional fonts it can have more than 256 characters, really so many how much allows RAM. Balancing only on one thing - use first byte of each character to information about character width and if width of any character get over 8 pixels use 2 bytes wide each character or to save space leave at begin of font information area how to locate character in output...

So, if you mean that it's useful comment these two Qs.

1 comment:

  1. Damn! Google forgot my first comment!!!!!!!!!!!!\

    ANYWAY... Most every LCD will fail with light pen (or light gun) because the pixels are 'static'. Light pen works with CRT because image on CRT is made with a 'beam'.

    The light pen works by 'calculating' the position of the 'beam'. Because LCD has no 'beam' (pixels are 'static'), a light pen (gun) will FAIL.

    If you are VERY skilled, you might hack your HP2025 to generate an image in 'beam format'... UNLIKELY. But if you did manage such an awesome hardware hack, your software would not work with other LCD displays!

    In short, light pen (light gun) only works with CRT.

    Only option for modern LCD/LED display is to invoke 'touch screen' technology. Most LCD/LED monitors (2014) do not have 'touch screen' feature... so you might have to wait a few years (until 'touch screen' is very common).

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