Spinner Implementation.


Le Chuck

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Hey everybody, I am working on two more micro arcades. Gauntlet and TRON. TRON made use of a spinner, a knob that would poll depending on how fast you turned it. In MAME4ALL I can map the analog input for the spinner to the analog stick (default is the shoulder buttons) but the polling is at a fixed rate. So if I move the analog stick a little or a lot TRON's arm will spin at the same rate. That's not arcade accurate and it makes other games like arkanoid and tempest all but unplayable as they rely heavily on the ability to meter the polling as you play. I hooked up a wireless mouse wanting to try the scroll wheel (effectively an arcade spinner) and couldn't get it to register in TRON.

Even if I can I'm worried that I'll have the same problem because the MAME4All menu has Dial Key/Joy Speed as the input rather than Dial Digital Speed. Additionally the game specific inputs read Dial rather than Dial Analog. These differences may seem semantic but I suspect that they are indicative of the way the MAME4All build sees the input.

Does anyone have recommendations to get analog input registering properly for the spinner input in these games? Is there another build of MAME compatible with the caanoo that might accept a larger range of inputs?

I appreciate the help. Please check out the build over on the BYOAC: http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=120012.0
 
The Caanoo has some g-sensors, which can be assigned in mame4all. Maybe you can use these as an input device, but I don't know, where they are located. It's just an idea, because that's the way, I play Arkanoid on my Caanoo.
 
Akabei said:
The Caanoo has some g-sensors, which can be assigned in mame4all. Maybe you can use these as an input device, but I don't know, where they are located. It's just an idea, because that's the way, I play Arkanoid on my Caanoo.

That's a fun feature but unfortunately it won't work in this application. Even isolating the sensor into a spinner wheel would not produce the right forces without significant gearing underneath the hood to transfer rotational input in to lever and fulcrum type input. I'm wondering how hard it would be to write in the feature in Mame4All? That's not something in my skill set to do, anybody in particular I should try to entice into tackling this sub project?
 
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Just in case anybody is keeping tabs on this:

Caanoo analog input will recognize one direction from analog rotary encoder, two direction causes a short and immediate system restart. Currently seeing if I can get Mame4all to recognize and resolve left inputs on the X axis and right on the Y. Then I'll use two encoders joined on one axis. That will work to isolate the short and "should" work to provide realistic rotary input on one complete axis. We shall see.
 
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