MAME: Lightpens

[Pernod]

What do we know about the various lightpens that were available for the Beeb?

From a little research I believe the following were available:
Colour Light Pen - RH Electronics
Stack Light Pen - Stack Computer Services
Datapen Light Pen - Datapen Technology (also Watford Electronics)
Robin Educational Light Pen - Educational Software Co.
... others?

There's also one from a Micro User Beeb Body Building Course (Oct.'83)

My impression is that most of those available likely work in the same way as that in the Micro User, in that they pulse LPSTB at a time after VSYNC to determine position on screen, and also provide a reading on analogue channel 0 to determine whether the pen is pointing at the screen.

The RH Colour Light Pen seems to be a bit more sophisticated as it comes with an additional interface box between the analogue port and pen, see http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org ... ghPen.html. Anyone know what this box does? I'm guessing it's reading colour from the screen and translating that into the other analogue channels in some way.

I'll start by emulating the Micro User/Stack/Datapen lightpen (using a mouse and pointer) as they should be relatively simple.

Do any of the other emulators support a light pen in any way?

[Pernod]

I've emulated the Stack Light Rifle and The Robin Light Pen, they're functionally very similar apart from the Stack trigger is readable as a Fire Button.

For the Stack Rifle we have 3 games, and these are all now playable:
Mad Bomber
High Noon
Nebulons

I presume the Stack Light Pen is functionally the same as the Rifle, but as we don't have any software archived then I can't confirm. Does anyone have a Stack Light Pen and the accompanying software?

For The Robin Light Pen we have the Paintbrush package, and this seems to be working correctly. Is any other software archived for use with The Robin?

The Datapen seemed quite popular but no software seems to be archived, anyone have one with software?

The RH Light Pen has an interface box which enables the pen to be configured in different operating modes. The functionality is described in the manual, but it's basically using the two Fire Button lines PB4/5 as outputs to the interface to clock in a command byte that sets the operating mode. This is currently in progress.

[Diminished]

Beebug 2-4 had an article on building your own light pen -- page 19.

There was an accompanying short BASIC program called Painter. Fortunately a magazine cassette UEF exists for this issue, so here's the software on disc.

painter.ssd

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