Trojan Products Review ---------------------- Just back from the Computer Shopper Show at Olympia! Wot a f*cking surprise no Amiga stuff :( Well, it'd be a VERY short article if that woz all! Luckly I went to the show to see a customer of mine: Griffin Distribution Ltd. Just recently they've moved into computer bits & bobs distributing a range of products from a German company called Sunnyline. Also they've picked up the distribution for Trojan... Trojan started up making lightguns and lightpens for the old Speccy and C64 in the '80s. A few years back they released a lightpen for the Amiga. As Trojan have just finished a PC version they're pushing the Amiga lightpen and lightgun out again. Griffin were selling the PC version at the show so I enquired after the earlier Amiga version and it just so happened they had a few of the Amiga lightpens and lightguns in the back room... Right, down to the reviews! Trojan Lightpen ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The lightpen is a small oblong box which, while not exactly being "ergonomically-designed", is still thin enough to hold like a pen. Two buttons are mounted at the front which duplicate the left and right mouse buttons. The lightpen plugs into the joystick port meaning the mouse can still be used. Supplied with the pen are two programmes: the lightpen driver and a simple art program called Kwikdraw. The driver is a small (3k) patch which hooks into the operating system and moves the mouse pointer when the lightpen is close to the screen. If you put the lightpen down you can still move the pointer about with the mouse. All "system-friendly" programmes with thus work with the pen. The Kwikdraw program is pretty basic but I expect most serious artists would have DPaint etc. anyway. It works with DPaint IV BTW :) Okay, sounds good so far, so wot are the bad points? Well, being a lightpen it obviously gets a bit confused if you run it over dark areas of the screen. Not alot you can do except turn the brightness up on your monitor or use lighter colours. This IS NOT Trojan's fault this happens to any lightpen. The nice light colours on Workbench 2 onwards work very well. A slightly trickier problem is the lightpen driver. As it has to patch into the video hardware it could interfere with with other programmes doing the same. So far the only thing I've found is that some music players use the Vertical Blank (VBL) signal for timing (as opposed to CIA timing). Either the player screws up or the pointer goes mad :( Again, to be fair to Trojan, this is the fault of the music players. The VBL is different for PAL (50Hz) and NTSC (60Hz) so the naughty programmers should use the CIA timers instead. This applies to some Workbench games. Colonization seriously screws up the lightpen driver :( Anyways, all you have to watch out for is playing music while you draw ;) Trojan Phazer ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The phazer is just the same lightpen in a fancy gun case. Again it simply plugs into the joystick port and away you go. The phazer comes with two games (if the thing sells well maybe more will appear). Skeet Shoot (clay pigeons to you and me) is a simple game where you try to tour the world by qualifing in shooting competitions. It's simple but fun. Orbital Destroyer is in the Space Invaders style, i.e. kill the aliens as they appear on screen. Again, simple stuff, but fun. The crunch here is whether more games will appear, either commercial or PD. Badger Trojan (NOT Griffin) for some example source code; Skeet Shoot was written in AMOS! The End Bit ~~~~~~~~~~~ Well then m8ys, it's coming up to Christmas, where can you get these goodies? All the Trojan products are available from: Griffin Distribution Ltd. Tel: 01279 721 269 Fax: 01279 721 379 The PC version is out now for £49.99. The Amiga lightpen and lightgun are just coming out now so the prices are unconfirmed. A mark 2 version of the lightpen (for the PC and the Amiga) is under development and will have a more "ergonomical" case. As well as the Trojan stuff Griffin also sell the Sunnyline range which includes disk boxes, mice & joysticks (mostly PC though), disk labels, copy holders, dust covers, monitor & printer stands and cleaning kits. Also now selling are a wide range of novelty mouse mats with a nice lot of graffiti style ones imported from America. I woz also impressed with the novelty mice in the shape of footballs and hamburgers. If you want to use PC serial mice there are some P.D. drivers around to allow connection to the Amiga. Wow! That's quite a plug ;) Anyway, if you give Griffin a ring, say Andy sent you. If you speak to Trevor or Alison they like good jokes ;)))) Cheerio for now people \|/ (O.o) \=/ Andy Pandy END ---