| ★ HARDWARE ★ CRAYONS OPTIQUE ★ CRAYON OPTIQUE DKTRONICS/GRAPHICS LIGHT PEN DK'TRONICS ★ |
DK'Tronics - Graphics Light Pen (Popular Computing Weekly) | Graphics Light Pen (Home Computing Weekly) |
Find out why David Holmes tripped the light fantastic when he reviewed dk'tronics Graphics Light Pen for the Amstrad CPC464. Brighten up your computing time with this super package from dk'tronics. It comprises three pieces of electronic wizardry, a concise manual, and the Light Pen — which looks like a fat ball-point attached to a yard of wire. The pen plugs into the interface which connects directly to the centronics port at the rear of the computer. A through bus allows for additional interfaces such as speech synthesisers and discs. With all this — and more to come — things are becoming a little crowded at this port. However it does all fit together nicely — and all components work in troublefree unison. For the uninitiated, the position of a light pen held against your monitor screen is returned as X, Y coordinates. So by knowing the position of a menu item on the screen it can be selected simply by pointing at it with the light pen. The third part of this package is a software cassette containing a painting and drawing program that enables you to put the light pen to immediate use. The care with which this program has been written is obvious at every step and is doubtless the best implementation I have seen. Full screen pictures are easily accomplished, with the light pen speeding up many of the processes. Better editing facilities would have made life easier for those error prone amongst use. Erasure using the paper colour to overwrite isn't always as simple as it sound. User friendly throughout, I found the ikons a nice touch, these are graphic representations of each new menu option and are used instead of the more boring textual lists. Using ikons means there is no language barrier, so the very young will be perfectly at home once they have been told what to do. Well-documented, the instruction book leaves nothing unexplained apart from how to use the software without the light pen or interface connected! Well try using the control key along with the numeric keypad, you'll be pleasantly surprised. Not being write protected, the software can readily be transferred to disc, thus reducing the five minute load time to as many seconds. Listed in the manual for you to type in are two programs that allow your art work to be dumped to a printer. One of these is for the Amstrad printer, and the other is for Epson compatible printers. The authors have gone to extraordinary lengths within the manual to explain in line by line detail how these dump routines work, so most printers will be capable of using these facilities. However, if like mine, your printer requires that BIT 7 should be set when sending high resolution data, then there is no way at all that the Amstrad computer can communicate in graphics mode. Owners of Amstrad and Epson type printers thereby having the advantage over us lesser mortals! Is there an inexpensive multicolour printer somewhere over the rainbow? D.H., HCW
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