| ★ HARDWARE ★ CRAYONS OPTIQUE ★ CRAYON - CRAYON OPTIQUE - LIGHT PEN - DART ★ |
| LE CRAYON OPTIQUE DE DART ELECTRONICS (CPC Revue) | Darts pen of many colours (Amstrad Computer User) |
Is the newest light pen the best? VAX draws his own conclusions Dart Electronics have produced a very unusual light pen, partly because the pen is connected to the electronics by a piece of optical fibre instead of the traditional piece of wire and partly because it is really 'pixel accurate', without the use of a nudge control. Simple software Most of what makes a lightpen is the drawing software that comes with it. I have to say that although the program is not as flash as the DK'tronics version, the performance of the pen more than makes up for it. Dart expect to have some new software very soon. Your main screen is totally reserved for drawing on, no status lines, flashing borders or stuff like that in sight. The options are on a separate menu page, revealed by pressing 'M' (I just love these mnemonic keystrokes, don't you?). Here is where you select your weapon: spray gun, thick to thin line or italic. You can also pick an elastic function. Nothing to do with maths, this is ye famous indecisive line/box/circle routine. You know, the one where you get to change the size of the shape before committing it to your masterpiece. Curved lines would have been nice, but if you want that degree of sophistication, I recommend a Macintosh or similar with something more accurate than a light pen. A magnify option would have really made an improvement though. I only ask for blood ...
Changing modes is also done from the menu. The fascinating bit is that it doesn't wipe the screen when you change mode. Drawing a picture with a thick pen in mode 1 and then changing to mode 0 produces psychedelic, if unpredictable, results. There is no patterned fill, but the ordinary fill works fine and is almost as fast as the Amstrad one. Beware the unfill though, this is not an oh-blast-give-me-the-old-one-back routine, it does a fill with the background colour (invariably white, you can't change it). If your work of art filled around a block of the same colour as you were filling in, this will be wiped out too. The first time this happened, the air around the computer was filled in deep blue in Anglo-Saxon style. If you need a repeating pattern on the picture there are some technicolour sprites which you define yourself and plonk on the screen. Draw backs This pen is not without its limitations. One great gaff I noticed is that it is impossible to adjust the sensitivity of the pen with the disc drive on. The reason for this is simple. There is an edge connector out the back of the lightpen box. This is also where the sensitivity knob lives. How you reach the knob with an interface attached is left as an exercise to the reader. Drawing anything on a dark background is almost impossible. To do it, you must change the colour of the ink to something more garish while drawing and change back again when finished. A similar problem exists when filling in the individual dots on sprites. Sometimes the pen does not want to know where to go, and there is just no way round it in some cases. This pen works quite happily on green screen or colour monitors, even on televisions using an MP1 and a bit of knob twiddling (this is when I discovered the position of the sensitivity control). Spray-painting confuses heck out of most colour TV's though, even if the light pen does work properly. Documentation is brief and to the point. It covers all the aspects of setting up and making a disc copy of the software that is provided with the pen on tape. Instructions are also given on how to use the pen in your own programs using a part of the code provided to find the spot on the screen the pen is pointing at. In all, the product is worth the few extra nicker that it costs over the competition. ACU #8603 |
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