SCRIBBLING ON THE SCREEN

In the past it has been difficult to recommend a light pen for the Spectrum.

The ones that I've seen ranged from average to mediocre.

All that's changed now with the release of the Spectrum Doodler from F E Electronics. At last there is a pen that works and, within its limitations, works well.

The acid test of any light pen is if, in free-hand mode, you can easily write your signature on the screen. With the Doodler you can, in a variety of brush styles and at a reasonable speed.

The hardware for the Doodler consists of the inevitable black box which plugs into the back of the Spectrum, the pen and, on the 128 version, a lead which plugs into the monitor socket. The pen has a switch built into the tip, and to register its position you simply press it lightly on to the screen. Where the pen scores is in its accuracy, in other words the quality of the software supplied with it.

In use the bottom four lines of the screen are always taken up with a menu bar from which all the main functions of the pen are chosen. Icons are used to show the choices available and the current mode and fill pattern are also displayed.

When one of the icons is selected a pull-down menu appears with more icons to show the choices. All the usual functions are available, drawing lines in various widths, squares, circles, triangles, text, magnify etc. The best feature is the brush option where you can choose one of 24 predefined patterns or even define your own. These can then be used both with the brush and as a fill pattern.

Overall these options are clear and well thought out. they make using the Doodler very simple so that even someone like me - with Van Gogh's ear for art - could use it.

There are one or two omissions that, in the light of the otherwise excellent software, are a bit of a let down. The main ones are that you can only draw on the top twenty lines of the screen; some method of scrolling it would have been useful. I found it impossible to change the background colour of the screen - I'm sure you can but couldn't find out how. With the well known attribute problems of the Spectrum some way of overlaying a grid showing the boundaries would have been useful. Rubber banding, standard on all the latest drawing programs, was noticeable by its absence. And lastly there are no facilities for printing your masterpiece, even an option to use the BasicCopy would have been useful. You have to save the picture, reset the computer and then reload the picture back in.

Despite these limitations the Doodler is by far the best light pen to date. The hardware is fast and accurate which, if you are using it in your own program is all you need, and the software is very good, although it could do with a final polish.

At £29.90 its the most expensive Spectrum light pen, but worth the extra.

F E Electronics, Chesterton Mill, French's Road, Cambridge, CB4 3NP. Tel: 0223-353355.

FE Electronics
£29.90

Like many of the products on show at the launch of the 128 the Doodler lightpen has only recently become fully available, and a first look at it seemed to indicate that like many of those other products this was just a 48K version hurriedly knocked together to be 128 compatible, but with no extra features to take advantage of the 128's extra memory.

The pen is connected to an interface which plugs into the rear port of the machine, but unlike the 48K version this interface now has an RGB lead rather flimsily connected to it which plugs into the 128's RGB socket. This must be plugged in, regardless of whether you are using a monitor or an ordinary TV, which means that the lightpen can only be used with the 128 (as the 48K machine doesn't have an RGB socket). That would seem to indicate that this is a peripheral intended purely for use with the 128. But the graphics software that comes with the pen will only run when the 128 is in 48K mode, which rather gives the game away.

Still, despite this I found that I did enjoy using the lightpen and that for certain purposes the pen was a more efficient tool than either a mouse or a joystick.

The Doodler software is an icon driven graphics package which allows you to use its facilities simply by pressing the lightpen onto the screen by the appropriate icon. Most of the time this then activates a pull-down menu which appears over the drawing area and allows you to select whatever option you choose. All the standard features that you'd expect are there; fill and brush, line, box, and circle drawing routines which are fast though there is no 'elastic' option which allows you to change the size of the shape before fixing it on the screen - if the shape you draw is slightly the wrong size you'll just have to erase it and draw another one.

Unfortunately the software though quite sophisticated, isn't up to the standard of state of the art programs like The Artist or Art Studio - a number of important refinements such as a cut and paste option, and the ability to draw onto the area of screen occupied by the icons are missing. I also found the menu system a little cumbersome to use since the menus aren't self contained and changes that are made to one menu can often require you to make changes to another before you can get the effect that you want. That's a shame really, because though I found the software a tittle disappointing I enjoyed using the pen itself.

For freehand drawing I found that it allowed me to get better results than using a mouse or joystick because the pen really is in physical contact with the drawing surface (of the TV screen) and this allows finer control than any other method where the control instrument is at a distance from the surface of the screen.

The pen is quite sturdily constructed (the manual states that it was constructed to be able to survive use in classrooms) as is the interface, and only the apparently hasty addition of the RGB lead spoils the look of the unit.

The manual does give a few tips about how to write your own software for use with the lightpen, but that's a task that will be beyond most of us. If it were possible to patch together a routine allowing you to use the pen with The Art Studio (and I'm sure that it is, after all Kempston tell you how to adapt Art Studio for use with their mouse) then the combination of the two would work very well, and it would cost less than half the price of any of the mouse units on the market at the moment. As it stands, the lightpen hardware is very good but is let down a bit by its software.