[Coco] Interface hardware for the coco (was talking about light guns/pens)

[Steve Bjork]

When I was the king of light pens for the TRS-80 model I (before the coco came out) we did not have access to the video timing of the screen.  But I was able to find where the light pen was without blinking ever char. on the screen. My code was so fast that I could find the pen in about 1/10 of a second.

This same technology could used on the CoCo with a VGA monitor if not for the slow refresh rate of LCD screen.  They hold the image too long and would slow down my technology and take close to a 1/2 second to find the pen.

As for making this stuff work with old games, I agree that's a lost cause.

A better technology is what I'm using right now, a touch screen.  They come down in price and both types of touch screens could easily interfaced into the coco.  I like the new capacitive type (Apple and others) since you only need your fingers to control it.  The older resistive touch screen need a small pen to make them work well.

Think how much easier gams like Polaris and clowns & balloons would be by just moving your finger around on the screen.

Now there is a project!

Steve Bjork
Sent from my iPad 2

On Apr 25, 2011, at 6:42 PM, gene heskett <gheskett at wdtv.com> wrote:

> On Monday, April 25, 2011 09:33:20 PM Frank Pittel did opine:
> 
> With modern LCD monitors, and their much more continuous light output (no 
> scanning beam), I would have to assume it is a problem that cannot be 
> solved in a real time situation.  One would have to blink, one at a time, 
> every pixel on the screen to reliably detect the aim point of the light 
> gun.  Given the number of pixels, even when done with blocks of several 
> pixels to essentially duplicate the coco's far lower pixel count, it would 
> be a several second period just to blink every pixel once.  How would the 
> light gun detect that in the face of a shaky aim?
> 
> Lost cause IMO.