Koala Technologies KoalaPad TouchTablet

KoalaPad TouchTablet

In the mid Eighties I had a Commodore 128 and I sometimes used KoalaPainter – the program that accompained the KoalaPad – with a joystick. Now, 30 years later, I can finally paint with the graphic tablet.

The application is easy to use: you can draw simple shapes (lines, circles, rectangles), paint freehand, or zoom a portion of the screen and draw one pixel at a time.

KoalaPad TouchTablet - back and side

The pictures on the box, like the majority of the images on the net, are frontal: the profile of the tablet is less bulky than it seems.

KoalaPad TouchTablet

Here’s the box:

KoalaPad TouchTablet - box (front)

The back of the box presents the product …: a business man in front of a PC (“Charts and Graphs”), then boys and girls of all ages. “Tools for Education” with an Apple II, “Colorful Designs” with a Commodore 64, “High Resolution Graphics” with an Atari 800.

KoalaPad TouchTablet - box (back)

The construction is very simple: disassembling the TouchTablet was easy and quick.

KoalaPad TouchTablet - teardown

A picture of the small motherboard:

KoalaPad TouchTablet - PCB

The KoalaPad connects to joystick port 1 of the Commodore 64; the cable ends at the connectors to the right of the picture.

The company logo and product name are clearly visible on the top case.

KoalaPad TouchTablet - detail

Even if there’s the KoalaPainter floppy, for convenience I tried to load the program from my Ultimate 1541 II, but all the versions I found on the net worked with the joystick only; I had to connect a real drive and load it from the original disk.

I made a disk image in .g64 format: there’s a copy protection that the simpler .d64 doesn’t support (when the program is loaded the drive seeks a track that probably has a specific error).

Download the original version of KoalaPainter for the KoalaPad TouchTablet.

Read more about the KoalaPad on Wikipedia.

2 thoughts on “Koala Technologies KoalaPad TouchTablet

  1. David Thornburg

    As I am the inventor of the Koalapd I’d like permission to use the box photo in an upcoming book. Please send permission to me at [removed].
    Thanks
    David

    Reply

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