LP4OS2.TXT - Light Pen for OS/2 This file describes my experience installing a light pen on my OS/2 system. Since I have tested this only with my own system,... THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS FILE IS SUPPLIED "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION ANY IMPLIED WARRANTY OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. If you have any additions, changes, comments, or suggestions, please send them via CompuServe mail to Robert Simpson, CompuServe ID 71520,737. Purpose, Use ------------ Before considering purchasing a light pen for OS/2, you should determine whether or not you have a good use for it. I purchased the light pen because I thought it might be useful for the OS/2 demos we occasionally do. At the Computer and Office Systems Show last September, space in our Team OS/2 booth was extremely limited, making it somewhat difficult to work with a mouse. One big disadvantage of a light pen is that there is only one button, activated by pressing the light pen against the monitor screen. There is no way to perform actions which require the second mouse button (such as brining up an object's menu) or both mouse buttons (such as bringing up the Window list). I use Shift+F10 to bring up the object menus and I use the Window list icon on the Lauch Pad to bring up the Window list. It takes a short while, but not too long, to get used to double-clicking without moving the pen between clicks. On the positive side, opening objects on the Launch Pad works nicely with the light pen since it only takes a single click. Hardware - The Light Pen ------------------------ I saw the "Warp Speed Light Pens" in the OS/2 Express advertisement section of the December 1994 issue of OS/2 Professional (p. 41). The light pens were discounted on closeout, marked down to $50 from $99 in the November issue. This means you may no longer be able to get the light pens from OS/2 Express. The light pen I purchased was a "Warp Speed Light Pen, OS/2 Version" manufactured by Warp Speed Light Pens, Inc., 1086 Mechem Drive, Ruidoso, NM, zip code 88345, telephone number 505/258-5713 8am-5pm Mountain Time. Hardware - Connection to Video Board ------------------------------------ A ribbon cable from the adapter board connects to the 26-pin feature connector on the video adapter. The manual also says "For ISA systems which use video adapters with an 'edge-card connection', please call Warp Speed and we will ship you a card made for those connections." Therefore, if you intend to purchase the light pen from OS/2 Express (if they have any left), you should make sure that your VGA video adapter has a 26-pin feature connector. If it has an edge-card connection, you may be able to get the appropriate light pen adapter directly from Warp Speed, Inc. Software - Drivers ------------------ The light pen comes with OS/2, DOS, and Windows drivers. I have it working with OS/2 Warp and DOS 6.3. I was unable to get it working with Win-OS2, although there are still a few more things I can try. (Since just about everything I use runs in native OS/2, and when purchasing games, I select DOS games over Windows versions, I don't have much need to run Windows.) When you install the OS/2 drivers for the light pen, you provide the source and target directories, the IRQ number of the adapter, and the video mode. The IRQ number is stored in LTPEN.INI and the video mode is determined by which driver file, LTPEN.6 (640x480), LTPEN.8 (800x600), or LTPEN.1 (1024x768), is copied to LTPEN.SYS in the target directory. Short of editing the LTPEN.INI binary file, the only way to change the IRQ value is to re-install the drivers. I copied the install disk to my hard drive and changed the "Src" and "Dst" parameters at the beginning of the LPOS2.CMD command procedure, making it easy to re-install the drivers with different IRQ numbers. Although the light pen adapter supports IRQ numbers 9, 3, 4, 5, and 7, I was unable to get it to work at IRQ 9, even though there are no other adapters in my system which uses IRQ 2/9. To get it working, I had to change my audio board from IRQ 5 to IRQ 10 to install the light pen adapter at the default IRQ 5. There is a note in the manual stating that "IRQ 2/9 is not applicable for Windows applications", so IRQ 5 seemed the better choice anyway. Also, I was unable to get the light pen and the mouse working at the same time. It would be nice to be able to use both devices, one at a time, but it's understandable why the system won't handle this (if anyone knows of a way to have two pointing devices active at the same time, please let me know). In order to disable the mouse, I had to remove "SERIAL=COM1" from the MOUSE.SYS line in CONFIG.SYS, resulting in two lines like this: DEVICE=d:\LIGHTPEN\LTPEN.SYS DEVICE=d:\OS2\BOOT\MOUSE.SYS TYPE=LTPEN$ Software - Command Lines ------------------------ Light pens can determine the position of the pen on the screen by timing the light from the monitor entering the pen. When the pen is in areas of the screen which are completely black, such as the OS/2 and DOS command line windows, there is no light entering the pen from the screen and it therefore cannot determine the location of the pen. The effect is that the pointer cursor stops at the edge of the command line window and then catches up when the pen hits the menu bar or the edge of the window. Besides this effect being undesirable, there are times you may want to perform pointer actions within the command line window. For example, I have used the light pen to mark and copy data from a command line window. To allow the pen to detect light within command line windows, the background color of the command line windows must be changed. Here is how I have done this for the OS/2 and DOS command lines. The general idea is to change the prompt, including ANSI escape codes to change the background color, then display the codes at least once and clear the screen. For the OS/2 command line, I replaced the PROMPT command in CONFIG.SYS with the following line: SET PROMPT=$E[36;44m[$P]$E[37;44m The two "m"s must be lower case. The system must be rebooted for the changes to take effect. Then I created the following REXX command procedure, which I called AUTOEXEC.CMD and put it in the root directory with AUTOEXEC.BAT: /* REXX */ 'cls' exit The command procedure can be executed automatically by changing the Program settings on the first page of the Settings notebook for the "OS/2 Window" icon in the "Command Prompts" folder to use the following values: Path and file name: d:\OS2\CMD.EXE Parameters: /K "d:\AUTOEXEC.CMD" Working directory: d:\ For the DOS command line, I added the following lines to AUTOEXEC.BAT, just after the "@ECHO OFF" on the first line of the file: ECHO  CLS PROMPT $E[36;44m$P$G$E[37;44m The "" character is the Escape character, entered from the keyboard by holding down "Alt" and pressing "27", then releasing the "Alt" key. The "m" in the ECHO and PROMPT commands must be lower case. In the above statements, the values "36;44" are for the color of the command line prompt, and the values "37;44" are for the rest of the screen. The foreground value, "36" or "37", can be changed to any value from "30" through "37". The background color, "44" can be changed to any value from "40" through "47". The values given produce white letters on a blue background, with a lighter blue prompt. Software - Alternative Configurations ------------------------------------- Normally I want to use the mouse, and have the light pen available primarily for demonstrations. Once I had made the CONFIG.SYS change to get the pen working, I copied the CONFIG.SYS file to another file named "CONFIG.L" in the "d:\OS2\BOOT\" directory. This allows that configuration to be selected by typing "L" at the "Recovery Choices" menu which is displayed by pressing "Alt+F1" just after OS/2 Warp begins booting (just after selecting it from the Boot Manager menu for example). Note that since this is a new feature in OS/2 Warp, you shouldn't try it under earlier versions, such as OS/2 2.1. Then I changed the MOUSE.SYS line in the CONFIG.SYS file in the root ("\") directory back to it's original form, and then rebooted, in order to return control to the mouse. Conclusion ---------- If you're interested in light pen support for OS/2, I hope this information has been useful.