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Screen Pens Have you used a screen pen?

#1 User is offline   Deepsycher Icon

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Posted 08 April 2006 - 03:50 PM

I am looking for a quality USB or PCI hardware based screen pen, metal with two buttons and one on the nib at a good price but not too expensive. Also it is not simple for me to find as for seeing too many tablet pens in the way.

At the moment I have a Design Technology DT 360 metal Light Pen (button only nib) with an ISA 8 bit or half sized ISA card, which I got second hand five years ago in a stall, in that currency I think for two dollars.

There are some problems and limitations. Works perfect on the Intel 430FX Triton motherboard (Socket 5 Pentium 100 MHz), but as for anything newer than the Intel 440 BX boards I have difficulty getting it to work. The problems exists on the type of motherboard or chipset. It does not matter on the type of operating system used, such as and limited to Windows 95, 98 or NT.

The closest I have got: Making sure that there are no conflictions on installing the driver, it works for the first time on the Abit BH6, but upon reboot the pen driver cannot find the card, until re-installing. Even though it is not shown as a conflict, I found that the Input Output addresses set from the pen card are automatically shared out to a device on another interrupt. No difference is made when I remove the conflicting card or try to change the Input Output addresses, as upon reboot it will still be allocated to another device. I am still experimenting to find out why it does that.

When trying to reserve the set interrupt from jumper setting on the pen card in the bios, it does not get past the post screen (blank screen) until removing. I tried other motherboards such as a Jetway Socket 370 board with the Ali M1542 chipset and a Tomato 440 LX board but still the same problems.

Another limitation is colour; the pen cannot move the pointer through dark colours or low brightness.

It works quite well after calibration, even though for the slowness, remote desktop is quite useful for the purpose of drawing and in this case and so accurately.

As for the requirements at the top, does anyone use a screen pen or know where I can get one reasonably priced?

This post has been edited by Deepsycher: 08 April 2006 - 04:19 PM

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#2 User is offline   Deepsycher Icon

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Posted 09 April 2006 - 10:01 PM

Very pleased, on the Jetway Ali M1542 motherboard I got the pen working perfectly. The only way I found was to disable a serial port to use the interrupt 3 or 4 from either two but no other.

Still it is an improvement over the slowness compared to the previous board. If the pen card interface was PCI or at least plug and play ISA that would have been worth every penny to me.

All day I have been experimenting with the boards on the table, and now the effort has paid off.

This post has been edited by Deepsycher: 09 April 2006 - 10:12 PM

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