This sounds great! I don't understand it all at the moment, because I need to study some more about electronics, but I think this will put me on the right track.
Essentially the Koala Pad was exactly like having a pair of rotary game paddles hooked up to the joystick input on your C64 or VIC-20. In fact, if you hooked paddle controllers to any program that used the Koala Pad, you could "draw" in a manner of speaking (like an etch-a-sketch). One paddle would provide the X co-ordinate, the other the Y co-ordinate.
The Koala Pad returned an analogue resistance value to the input on the joystick port. This was sampled by the VIC(?) chip on the VIC 20, and (maybe) the SID chip on the C64 to convert it to a digital value it would report to the program.
I'm not sure if the Amiga can do analogue to digital conversions on the joystick ports. I've never seen paddle controllers used on a an Amiga.
It's certainly possible to hook a Koala to an Amiga if you have the knowledge of how to do analogue to digital sampling on one of the Amiga's ports.
And Deluxe Paint and some other programs did in fact have pressure sensitivity (from some of the Amiga specific tablets) if you had a tablet that was specifically supported by Deluxe Paint ---- I think the tablet for the Amiga was called SummaSketch or perhaps that was the name of the company.
As for the Amiga's lack of drivers vs. PC....well....you still needed drivers on the Amiga side, it was just that the hardware could be recognized by the Amiga without setting IRCs and figuring out hardware conflicts, etc.
You can't just plug a graphics card into an Amiga, for instance, without installing RTG software (which is essentially a driver).
