/vr/ - Retro Games

3) Light pen
It was not uncommon to find light pens in US labs and universities in the 60-70s with computers such as the IBM 2250 and the PLATO system -the first version of Shanghai was entirely made with a light pen on a PLATO IV terminal. From the early 80s, you could find this kind of tool on sale in the West as well as in Japan and it’s no surprise that some video game companies such as Tehkan (rechristened Tecmo in 1986) and Dempa (which used one to develop the X1 version of Xevious in 1984) adopted this device at a time when, as with the scanner, its usefulness was still questionable.
It was around 1983 that Sega started using the first version of its Digitizer System, a machine composed of two screens originally intended for developing arcade games. The first screen displayed the end result with pixels in their real size while the second was connected to a light pen with which you could draw pixels.
The Digitizer System, with which Ryuichi Nishizawa and his company developed Wonder Boy (1986) and its sequel after Sega lended them a unit, had no floppy disk drive, which means that saving data was a rather tedious task to say the least. “The external device was a ROM writer, explains Nishizawa. So the ROM is connected to a ROM socket, and then you clip it down. Then you push save, and writing begins. For loading, likewise, you have to connect a ROM device. It was very inefficient! […] You don’t make small changes! Because it’s too much of a hassle. […] Each ROM chip was priced around 500 yen. ROM is a one-off device, you can’t re-use it. Well, you can delete the content, but there’s a separate device called an eraser, to erase what’s there. I think a tape would have been a faster option.”
For the third episode of the Wonder Boy series, Westone decided to go with its own development tools.