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Atarigraphics - Lightpen Doodles


gilsaluki

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How accurate are the official Atari lightpens?  I built a couple back in 1984, but they were never very accurate.  I wrote a simple drawing program to draw in high res with a bright white screen & black dots.  IIRC, it worked pretty well in the Y axis, but I would get quite a bit of scatter in the x axis.

 

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Some of the accuracy comes from getting the CRT adjusted correctly (brightness).  Atarigraphics is good to use because it has various widths of line drawing.  I frequently use the most coarse mode for smear effect.  I prefer it over the touch tablet, uses a matrix, and that cursor jumps all over the place.   Atari Lightpens are not nearly as precise as commercial-grade ones, but they were cheap (even back in the day).

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I probably built mine based on some magazine article.  IIRC, it was just a phototransistor and a resistor.  The first one I built into a small AA or AAA penlight case.  I think that this is what the article had done.  For the second one, I actually built it into a pen.  I think that I was figuring that the smaller diameter body and smaller aperture would give me better accuracy.

 

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Yeah, lightpens are technologically very simple devices.  Having the actual Atari one is good because the program can be used without the Keyboard, has a switch built into its tip to start/stop drawing functions or to set a shape in place (square, trapezoid, circle).  Keyboard is really only needed when you want the TABS to disappear/reappear on screen.  

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  • 3 weeks later...
23 hours ago, tabar said:

I don't have a way of using a rom on real hardware, i do have sio2usb from Atarimax but i dont think it does roms. is there an ATR of it? autorun or DOS load?

I believe there are some other graphics apps with lightpen support that can be run from disk.  Rambrandt or Blazing Paddles maybe?

 

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