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26-537: The XG-1 is a specialized light pen . Generic light pen support was built into the Atari 8-bit home computers since its 1979 launch. The Atari 400/800 Hardware Technical Reference recommends a calibration procedure each time a light pen is used, so that the software can compensate for this offset for maximal accuracy. Bug Hunt and Barnyard Blaster for the XEGS each have unique hard-coded values. A reddish-orange version of

52-477: A bitmapped graphics mode, also offering a parallel printer port . This allows the HGC to offer both high-quality text and graphics from a single card. The HGC was very popular and became a widely supported de facto display standard on IBM PC compatibles . The HGC standard was used long after more technically capable systems had entered the market, especially on dual-monitor setups. The Hercules Graphics Card

78-774: A CGA or other color card at address B8000h. In text mode, the HGC appears exactly like an MDA card. Graphics mode requires new techniques to use. Unlike the MDA and CGA, the PC BIOS provides no intrinsic support for the HGC. Hercules developed extensions, called HBASIC , for IBM Advanced BASIC to add HGC support and Hercules cards came with Graph X , a software library for Hercules graphical-mode support and geometric primitives . Popular IBM PC programs such as Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet, AutoCAD computer-aided drafting, Pagemaker and Xerox Ventura desktop publishing, and Microsoft Flight Simulator 2.0 came with their own drivers to use

104-551: A color monitor, color appears as simulated grayscale in varying dithering patterns . Clones of the Hercules appeared, including generic models at very low prices, usually without the printer port. Hercules advertisements implied that use of generic Hercules clones can damage the monitor. The Hercules Graphics Card was very successful, especially after Lotus 1-2-3 supported it, with one-half million units sold by 1985. As of June 1986 Hercules Computer Technology had 18% of

130-429: A desk that tilts the monitor, the light pen fell out of use as a general-purpose input device. Light pen was also perceived as working well only on displays with low persistence, which tend to flicker . Hercules Graphics Card The Hercules Graphics Card ( HGC ) is a computer graphics controller formerly made by Hercules Computer Technology, Inc. that combines IBM 's text-only MDA display standard with

156-592: A front page feature on programming the XG-1 in users' custom software, including his program allowing the light gun to be used to make menu selections. He gave the XG-1 a positive review, calling it an "exciting alternative to joysticks". He said it "has much more 'noise' in the horizontal direction than vertical" due to hardware limitations. The 2014 book Vintage Game Consoles also criticized its accuracy compared to Nintendo and Sega, but says it became collectible as Atari's only light gun. Light pen A light pen

182-566: A light pen, as did early Tandy 1000 computers, the Thomson MO5 computer family, the Amiga , Atari 8-bit , Commodore 8-bit , some MSX computers and Amstrad PCW home computers. For the MSX computers, Sanyo produced a light pen interface cartridge. Because the user was required to hold their arm in front of the screen for long periods of time (potentially causing " gorilla arm ") or to use

208-532: A light pen, where operator clicked symbols superimposed on edited footage. Light pen usage was expanded in the early 1980s to music workstations such as the Fairlight CMI and personal computers such as the BBC Micro and Holborn 9100 . IBM PC -compatible MDA (only early versions), CGA , HGC (including HGC+ and InColor ) and some EGA graphics cards also featured a connector compatible with

234-473: A similar idea at the "Display 2006" show in Japan ). A light pen detects changes in brightness of nearby screen pixels when scanned by cathode-ray tube electron beam and communicates the timing of this event to the computer. Since a CRT scans the entire screen one pixel at a time, the computer can keep track of the expected time of scanning various locations on screen by the beam and infer the pen's position from

260-426: Is a computer input device in the form of a light-sensitive wand used in conjunction with a computer's cathode-ray tube (CRT) display. It allows the user to point to displayed objects or draw on the screen in a similar way to a touchscreen but with greater positional accuracy. A light pen can work with any CRT-based display, but its ability to be used with LCDs was unclear (though Toshiba and Hitachi displayed

286-540: Is limited to a fixed character set . These adapters were quickly found to be inadequate by the market, creating a demand for a card that offers high-resolution graphics and text. The founder of Hercules Computer Technology , Van Suwannukul, created the Hercules Graphics Card so that he could work on his doctoral thesis on an IBM PC using the Thai alphabet , impossible with the low resolution of CGA or

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312-610: The AN/FSQ-7 for military airspace surveillance. This is not very surprising, given its relationship with the Whirlwind projects. See Semi-Automatic Ground Environment for more details. During the 1960s, light pens were common on graphics terminals such as the IBM 2250 and were also available for the IBM 3270 text-only terminal. The first nonlinear editor, the CMX 600 was controlled by

338-764: The Hercules Network Card Plus , ( HNC NB112 ) a variant of the Graphics Card Plus with an integrated TOPS /FlashTalk-compatible network adapter. Like the HGC+, it supported RAMFONT, but lacked a printer port. The InColor Card ( GB222 ) was introduced in April 1987. It included color capabilities similar to the EGA , with 16 colors from a palette of 64. It retained the same two modes ( 80 × 25 text with redefinable fonts and 720 × 348 graphics), and

364-528: The HGC can hold two graphics display pages. Either page can be selected for display by setting a single bit in the Mode Control Register. Another bit, in a configuration register exclusive to the HGC, determines whether the second 32 KB of RAM on the HGC is accessible to the CPU at the base address B8000h. This bit is reset at system reset (e.g. power-on) so that the card does not conflict with

390-409: The Hercules card provides a horizontal scanning frequency of 18.425 ± 0.500 kHz and 50 Hz vertical. It runs at two slightly different sets of frequencies depending on whether in text or graphics mode, providing a different vertical refresh rate and a different aspect ratio via a different pixel clock and number of scanlines. The Hercules card provides two modes: The text mode of

416-523: The Hercules card uses the same signal timing as the MDA text mode. The Hercules graphics mode is similar to the CGA high-resolution ( 640 × 200 ) two-color mode; the video buffer contains a packed-pixel bitmap (eight pixels per byte, one bit per pixel) with the same byte format—including the pixel-to-bit mapping and byte order—as the CGA two-color graphics mode, and the video buffer is also split into interleaved banks, each 8 KB in size. However, because in

442-402: The Hercules graphics mode there are more than 256 scanlines and the display buffer size is nearly 32 KB (instead of 16 KB as in all CGA graphics modes), four interleaved banks are used in the Hercules mode instead of two as in the CGA modes. Also, to represent 720 pixels per line instead of 640 as on the CGA, each scanline has 90 bytes of pixel data instead of 80. The 64 KB RAM of

468-399: The Hercules graphics mode. Though the graphics mode of the Hercules card is not CGA-compatible, it is similar enough to the two CGA graphics modes that with the use of third-party terminate-and-stay-resident programs it can also work with programs written for the CGA card's standard graphics modes. As the Hercules card does not actually have color-generating circuitry, nor can it connect to

494-418: The fixed character set of MDA. It initially retailed in 1982 for $ 499. The original HGC is an 8-bit ISA card with 64 KB of RAM , visible on the board as eight 4164 RAM chips, and a DE-9 output compatible with the IBM monochrome monitor used with the MDA. Like the MDA, it includes a parallel interface for attaching a printer. The video output is 5 V TTL , as with the MDA card. Nominally,

520-506: The graphics card market, second to IBM. Hercules-compatible graphics cards shipped as standard hardware with most PC clones . As a de facto standard , support in software was widespread. The Hercules Graphics Card had several versions. Several updated versions of the original Hercules Graphics Card exist. The original board from 1982 is referenced as GB100 , with updated versions in 1983 ( GB101 ), 1984 ( GB102 ) and 1988 ( GB102Z ). The Hercules Graphics Card Plus or HGC+ ( GB112 )

546-663: The gun was planned for the 2600 and 7800 but was never released. Sentinel is the only game released for the gun on the 2600 console, and Shooting Arcade was planned but never released. For Antic magazine in August 1988, Matthew Ratcliff criticized the poor horizontal accuracy of the XG-1 light gun compared to the NES Zapper or the Sega Light Phaser . In December 1988, he said that, to switch between light gun and joystick games, active XEGS gamers are frustrated by

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572-600: The latest time stamps. The first light pen, at this time still called "light gun", was created around 1951–1955 as part of the Whirlwind I project at MIT , where it was used to select discrete symbols on the screen, and later at the SAGE project, where it was used for tactical real-time-control of a radar-networked airspace. One of the first more widely deployed uses was in the Situation Display consoles of

598-445: The need to continually re-plug their devices and power cycle the system, due to the system's lack of autodetection, which is complicated by its awkwardly downward slanting ports. He said " Barnyard Blaster and Bug Hunt could have been just a bit smarter" by including the simple routine that the magazine was forced to write and publish as a workaround. In the August 1989 issue of A.N.A.L.O.G. Computing magazine, Matthew Ratcliff wrote

624-495: Was backward-compatible with software written for the earlier monochrome Hercules cards. The Hercules Color Card ( GB200 ) was a CGA-compatible video board and should not be confused with the InColor Card. This board could coexist with the HGC and still allow both graphics pages to be used. It would detect when the second graphics page was selected and disable access to its own memory, which would otherwise have been at

650-584: Was released in June 1986 at an original retail price of $ 299. It was an enhancement of the HGC, adding support for redefinable fonts called RAMFONT in MDA -compatible text mode. It was based around a specialty chip designed by Hercules Computer Technology, unlike the original Hercules Graphics Card, which used standard components. Software support included Lotus 1-2-3  v2, Symphony  1.1, Framework II and Microsoft Word  3. In 1988 Hercules released

676-752: Was released to fill a gap in the IBM video product lineup. When the IBM Personal Computer was launched in 1981, it had two graphics cards available: the Color Graphics Adapter (CGA) and the Monochrome Display And Printer Adapter (MDA). CGA offered low-resolution ( 320 × 200 ) color graphics and medium-resolution ( 640 × 200 ) monochrome graphics, while MDA offers a sharper text mode (equivalent to 720 × 350 ) but has no per-pixel addressing modes and

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