Buying or making graphics tablet

[AmigaBruno]

So far I've had no sign of life out of my Micrograf Tabby at all. Of course I mean that it doesn't move the mouse pointer or do anything at all.

The seller has now admitted that in spite of describing it as "used" and claiming that it worked,he actually found it in his loft and didn't have an Amiga to test it on.

This tablet came with what looks like a PC to Amiga serial adaptor. I have just unplugged it from the adaptor and checked that the plug looks the same as an Amiga mouse/Atari joystick plug. I think the next stage is to plug it in to an Amiga mouse port and see if it does anything. I could try it on my A500 Plus, which I hardly use. Some time ago I plugged in an Atari Touch Tablet, which didn't damage my mouse port, but as soon as Workbench loaded I got an error message saying that it wasn't supported.

[AmigaBruno]

I have now contacted the user on Amibay, as well as a large Amiga dealer on eBay about getting the right driver. The dealer actually sold a Tabby disk just before I got my tablet! I suppose the reason why the Atari Touch Tablet didn't ruin my Amiga mouse port is because it was designed to plug into an Atari joystick style port.

I notice there are six programs on Aminet that come up in a search for "tablet driver". I wonder if any of them is compatible with the Micrograf Tabby?

The way things stand at least I've got a PC to Amiga serial adaptor.

[chiark]

I wrote the driver for the Amiga for the Tabby graphics tablet - I'll resurrect what I can find and post it here

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

I wrote the driver for the Amiga for the Tabby graphics tablet - I'll resurrect what I can find and post it here

Awesome!  Many dancing bananas for you, sir.    :banana:  :banana:  :banana:

Perhaps if you'd be willing to release the software to the public, someone could upload it to Aminet so that it would be available to future users, as well?

[AmigaBruno]

I wrote the driver for the Amiga for the Tabby graphics tablet - I'll resurrect what I can find and post it here

Thank you so much! I hope this will enable me to use it within DPaint, which is all I really want. :drink::drink:

[dschallock]

I wrote the driver for the Amiga for the Tabby graphics tablet - I'll resurrect what I can find and post it here

Wow! That's what I'm talking about.  5 more bananas! :banana::banana::banana::banana::banana:

[chiark]

Here we go then, driver and short story here http://www.binarydevotion.com/?p=213

If I remember rightly it was quite a CPU hog so play with the priority as appropriate.  Try the different modes too, as the tablet is quite jittery so I tried to model the effect of the pointer being attracted to the tablet coordinates by a spring (high initial acceleration getting slower), "gravity" (the tablet coordinates were "downhill" and the pointer would roll towards them) and filtered.  I think.  Need to reinstall my Amiga to check all this

I should probably rewrite this with better knowledge...  but this works.

[chiark]

And I'll put this onto Aminet, too - have reached out to the aminet admins as this includes commodore "installer", which Micrograf received a license to distribute but I'm not sure whether can be included on Aminet...

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Fantastic!  Hope this is helpful to the OP.  Great story, glad you made a little money for your work, and even more so that you're still around to help folks out.  

[QuikSanz]

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).

I use an analogue joystick with the the the programs that support the option, so Amigas can "see" a potentiometer from game ports, only requires a digital to analogue adapter cable.

Chris

[AmigaBruno]

Well done! I've just downloaded and unarchived that on my laptop running Linux and read the documentation. I plan to install it on my Amiga A1200 later today. I hope to post some screenshots soon.

Of course, after installation I may well find that the Tabby itself doesn't work because of physical damage, but I'm now a member of a club which makes, fixes and modifies things, so I can take it over to there, plug my Amiga A1200 into an LCD TV via SCART and we can get it working. I also saw a Wacom tablet in their premises, but I don't know how old it is or if it's compatible.

[chiark]

Good luck

[paul1981]

Here we go then, driver and short story here http://www.binarydevotion.com/?p=213

If I remember rightly it was quite a CPU hog so play with the priority as appropriate.  Try the different modes too, as the tablet is quite jittery so I tried to model the effect of the pointer being attracted to the tablet coordinates by a spring (high initial acceleration getting slower), "gravity" (the tablet coordinates were "downhill" and the pointer would roll towards them) and filtered.  I think.  Need to reinstall my Amiga to check all this

I should probably rewrite this with better knowledge...  but this works.

What a brilliant website that is! Going to enjoy reading that tonight.

[Kronos]

Back in the days (ca. 1993) I wrote a driver for serial "digitizer" (tablet without pressure sensor) and had adapted it to send DPaintIV commands from a a toolbar (the tablet allowed for a pice of printetd paper below its transparent surface).

All aimed at commercial project which eventually fell through.

No I don't have the sources anymore, but the protocol was pretty straightforward.