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.

Tuesday, December 2, 2014

Now is December.
I'm near finish with Renderer, I can to adjust tools, but really I have full hands of work.
All of you can see that in present are touch devices in trend, so I tried to do with this on Commodore 128 using lightpen. We all know that modern displays - LCDs are not working with lightpens, only old CRT monitors, but I found one which allows this also and it's LCD. I tried to test lightpen in case of VIC screen and it works, I want to try it also with VDC screen, but now I'm satisfied with results. It's HP 2025 LCD with inputs CVBS, S-Video, VGA, DVI-I and DVI-D...
In my head are more projects and have problem to make any priority, in words better to say:
I don't know what to do first...
Please forgive me that The Ace is not only one project, I do all possible in free time 'cause real life is here and many tasks are important for real living...