80-Bus News |
July–October 1982 · Volume 1 · Issue 3 |
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The Arfon light pen is housed in a black anodised aluminium cylinder about 18cm long and 2cm in diameter. It’s not heavy, weighing in at about 2.5 Ounces (my wife’s scales aren’t metric!), and is supplied with about 130cms of lead terminated in a 5-pin DIN plug. This DIN plug will plug directly into the Gemini GM812 IVC card. I believe there is an interface available for a Nascom, but I have not seen this and cannot comment on it. There is a push button mounted in the pen body close to the end that carries the photo-diode. This push button falls conveniently under the fore-finger when the pen is held in a ‘pen-like’ manner.
The output of the photo-diode is amplified and limited to produce a TTL compatible STROBE signal. The switch is debounced and produces a TTL compatible ENABLE signal.
I have used the light pen in conjunction with the Gemini IVC and shall thus restrict my discussions to this particular combination.
The 6845 CRT controller used on the IVC directly supports a light pen. The STROBE output of the light pen is connected through to the LPEN input on the 6845. As supplied the light pen provides a negative going strobe pulse. The CRI controller uses the rising edge of this strobe as a trigger for latching the screen address, and so all coordinates returned will be found to be offset by the strobe pulse width. Purists may like to dismantle the light pen and select the opposite polarity for the strobe, but this is of little consequence as it can easily be catered for in software. Note, however, that if the strobe is left as it is the offset required will be dependent on the light pen used, and also on the screen width in use. (A strobe width of 6us is 12 characters in the 80-wide mode, and nearly half that in the 48-wide mode).
The video card supports the ESC P command for returning the coordinates of the light pen. At the time the IVC software was written no light pen was available to try with it, and so the function only performs the simple operations as follows:–
| i) | Wait until the light pen switch is found to be operated. |
| ii) | Wait one TV frame. |
| iii) | Read the light pen register in the CRT controller. |
| iv) | Adjust the address to account for IVC hardware delays. |
| v) | Test for a valid screen address. |
| vi) | If the address is not valid then go to i). |
| vii) | Convert the address to equivalent Row/Column coordinates. |
| viii) | Return the coordinates to the host system. |
This performs the basic function required by a controlling program, but to get the best out of it a little more support is required. This is illustrated in the following sections using the ESC L and ESC U functions of the IVC. (See IVC manual). One small point to take into account with the function is that if the switch on the pen is held down the IVC will immediately return a set of coordinates whenever the ESC P sequence is received. ie The function is level sensitive, not edge triggered. The controlling software will have to decide if the coordinate pair represent a new selection, or if the operator has still not yet released the switch from his last selection. (See example 4 for a way round this).
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