Lightpen Game Concepts

[jaymzjulian]

I'm not going to do any of these any time soon, but in case anyone else was interested, I had some ideas that would be well doable with the CodeSprite stuff that Malban came up with:

a) a drag-and-drop puzzle game like E-Motion ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Motion ).  That game is based around colour, so you'd need to change it to shaps, but ti could be a good fit.  Give each "object" and ID, and then drag them around based on which part of the object is touched.... in my head I think i'd implement it by splitting each one into a couple of "virtual" sprites, and float them towards the center? (in the original you nudge them with a ship, but "drag with the lightpen" is totally a mechanic that would work well...)

b) Since people are hooking up lightgfuns to the port - the nice thing about this is that it _only_ requires contact and a trigger button - you could do something like Operation Wolf pretty easily.

c) The incredible vectrex machine - this one would be a lot of work, since you'd have to impelemnt a full drag/drop system, plus physics.  But the physics are absolujtely doable on the v32, so maybe?

d) lemmings!  I _suspect_ you might have some flicker troubles at 50 lemmings, though, and I've no idea how you'd do the environments, but it'd be cool if it could be made to work!  You'd have to make some modifications to the game to "vector" well, though....

[Vectrex32]

I experimented with the light pen before releasing 1.21, but I decided that I didn't have a good solution yet.

My approach was to call the normal drawing functions, but to enable interrupts from the light pen. This had the effect of distorting what was drawn on the screen. Apparently, timing is too delicate to tolerate an interrupt.

I looked at Art Master's source code and it doesn't call the BIOS draw routines; it has its own, light pen-friendly routines. I guess that's the way to go.

- Bob