At $89.95 for the Koala Pad, I/F and ZPAINT, this is a fair alternative to buying a new computer for graphics. $19.95 for
TECH DRAW ( 1985 by ZEBRA Systems, Inc.) completed the package, which arrived ten days later with items that will discuss later (when they work).
A Koala Pad is a digitizing table where a grid is used to read the position of a stylus that the user presses against a flat surface. In my experience, the pad is far superior to a mouse as you can emulate freehand drawing and you don’t have to have a clean desk to use it. As delivered, the pad and the I/F (an uncased but heavily shielded circuit with two ports for pads and an edge connector for your AERCO or whatever) worked perfectly and included clear instructions for installation.
ZPAINT, a simple but effective color graphics package, has the expected selections for paper color (which may be changed at any time without wiping out the drawing), ink, brush or pen, erase or draw, line or freehand, and circle. It is pleasant to play with but images created cannot be printed as the gray scaling of colors does not register as anything but black. A Tasman I/F in combination with a Radio Shack color printer might work if you can write a driver for it. For my wife, a prize winning painter ZPAINT proved more fun for me; she found it similiar to working with oil-based pastels.
TECH DRAW is an altogether different kind of program. Al
Hartman, the chief hacker at ZEBRA, set out to emulate MacPaint, with most user interaction between the screen and the Koala Pad (instead of a mouse). Its features include
A) Brush selection (16 in all)
B) Shade and pattern selection (16 in all)
C) Filters for permitting drawing in only vertical or horizontal directions (if desired)
D) A line drawing mode (point to point selection, then connected with a button push)
E) A circle drawer(seems useless until you note it works with the selected brush and shade)
F) A fill mode
G) An undo mode(which can be undone)
H) A full screen text editor which includes a choice of small, medium or large type in bold, plain or Italic.
I) An I/O menu to select a small (2 x 4 inch) or a large (8 x 10 1/2) image on your 80 column printer, save, load, verify, and printing to either the Alphacom or TS2040 thermal printers. For this you customize to suit printer and I/F type when creating your backup tapes. The customization list inlcudes Epson, Okidata, Gorilla
Banana, and a few other dot matrix printer, and either the Tasman or Aerco I/F’s. As these print drivers happen to be on a seperate file, I have no doubt a clever person could add them to other programs. Al Hartman would probably help you.
Yes, Dad, but does it work? It works brilliantly. How brilliantly? Well, it does what the ad copy says, and it does it in a hurry (machine code, naturally). The enclosed printouts probably don’t do the thing much justice. I am not an artist and the ribbon on my FX is a tad old but I find it hard to believe anyone could make a better program of this type for the TS2068. It has a wide variety of uses, from holiday cards to circuit design. True, it won’t take data from VU-CALC and make a pie chart but you can make one easily enough. And consider this.
While MacPaint has all kinds of cute scaling tricks and libraries of shapes, you have to spend $2000 bucks to get the computer, a second drive and a printer. Why bother? TECH DRAW and the Koala Pad cost a grand total of $119.95 and with patience, time and effort it’s unlikely you could do better by blowing the extra $1881.05 on a Macintosh. Of course a disk drive would make it better…
…about which I write in my next contribution.
Arthur Mortensen