Koala Pad Emulation
Posted: Wed Feb 02, 2005 10:42 pm
I'm not sure how well-remembered this tablet device is these days, all I do know is that it put me on the road to computer graphics nerdery from a very young age, with endless hours of pointy-clicky-drawy fun for the spoiled 6-year-old. (The link's for illustrative purposes only, I'm assuming the Apple II and C64 versions were fairly different on the technical level)
I'm not as technically knowledgeable as most people who'd discuss the guts of emulators, but this thing seems to be conceptually simple, at least. Being an absolute pointing device (i.e. the touch-sensitive area of the pad maps directly to the area of the screen), it seems to report its position to the C64 via control port 1, using the first paddle line for the x location, and second paddle for the y.
How hard would to be, say, to add another mode to the "Control Port 1" field under the Input setup page, called "KoalaPad" - just as an idea, it could take the mouse pointer's current position over the CCS64 window (or more specifically, the non-border area of the emulated display), and report its x and y as values on the virtual 64's paddle input?
The device also has two buttons which I would guess report as paddle 1 trigger and paddle 2 trigger - these could be set off by the mouse's left & right buttons.
Incidentally, I've been able to operate KoalaPainter (the bundled drawing software) in an incredibly clumsy way by switching CCS64's Port 1 input to Paddle mode, using Mouse + Analog gamepad.
Forgive the layman's explanation, but this has been a question on my mind ever since I got into the world of C64 emulators, and now that I've done a bit of poking around, it doesn't seem as complicated as I thought.
Thanks for reading and congratulations on an awesome piece of software!
I'm not as technically knowledgeable as most people who'd discuss the guts of emulators, but this thing seems to be conceptually simple, at least. Being an absolute pointing device (i.e. the touch-sensitive area of the pad maps directly to the area of the screen), it seems to report its position to the C64 via control port 1, using the first paddle line for the x location, and second paddle for the y.
How hard would to be, say, to add another mode to the "Control Port 1" field under the Input setup page, called "KoalaPad" - just as an idea, it could take the mouse pointer's current position over the CCS64 window (or more specifically, the non-border area of the emulated display), and report its x and y as values on the virtual 64's paddle input?
The device also has two buttons which I would guess report as paddle 1 trigger and paddle 2 trigger - these could be set off by the mouse's left & right buttons.
Incidentally, I've been able to operate KoalaPainter (the bundled drawing software) in an incredibly clumsy way by switching CCS64's Port 1 input to Paddle mode, using Mouse + Analog gamepad.
Forgive the layman's explanation, but this has been a question on my mind ever since I got into the world of C64 emulators, and now that I've done a bit of poking around, it doesn't seem as complicated as I thought.
Thanks for reading and congratulations on an awesome piece of software!