Spinner Mods

[Aceisback]

Has anyone made or modified a spinner so that it can be programmed to work with a variety of different games and emulators (eg. Arkanoid, Kaboom on Atari 2600, etc.)?

[Louis Tully]

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[thatpurplestuff]

I'm pretty ignorant on this subject, but what is the dealbreaker on using a standard spinner like the Turbotwist or SpinTrak with an emulator like Stella?  Is it just as issue of not emulating the spinner control accurately?  Could sensitivity settings be tweaked to help this or is it a lost cause without a potentiometer?

[Aceisback]

Some games just cannot be played with certain spinners. I have a Slik Stik Tornado, and Arknoid and Kaboom were impossible to play, yet Tempest plays just fine. The TurboTwist 2 works for Arknoid by what I have read. It appears hard to find a spinner that works properly for every games.

[PL1]

It's easy to scale down spinner resolution so start with a high-res spinner or you'll never play the high-res games smoothly.

In MAME, you'll need to use the Spinner Turn Count to change the analog sensitivity for each game.

Other emulators may allow similar adjustments.


Scott

[DarthMarino]

I've tried the Turbo Twist 2 with Kaboom! and it worked great....for a few seconds.  The problem occurred when reversing direction. The original Atari Paddle had defined stopping points.  With a spinner like Turbo Twist, you can rotate past that stopping point.  When you reverse direction nothing would happen until (I presume) you reach the original stopping point. I think this is more of a software issue than an issue with the sensitivity of the spinners.

[RandyT]

Kaboom! was pretty much an Activision rip on the original Atari Avalanche arcade game.  As indicated, the originals in both cases used a potentiometer based control, with a hard end stop.  Avalanche works fine, and reverses as soon as turned in the other direction, but obviously stops once the edge of the screen is encountered.  It's not too hard to adjust your play to account for this (I have, and it's easily one of my favorite games). 

Kaboom!, on the other hand, is hampered by the paddle control emulation.  There's a long post here (some language NSFW) which lays out the issues.  It seems like fixing the basic "buffering" issue wouldn't be too difficult, but I don't think it has been done yet.

Regardless, these types of games absolutely require a high resolution spinner.  A potentiometer is an analog, and in this case 8-bit control.  This means that for whatever portion of a revolution the control allowed, it was capable of about 256 positions.  A low resolution spinner can still provide that number of positions, but may take more than a complete revolution to provide it.  The other alternative is to move more than one position at a time, making the control less precise.  Neither are a very good alternative for these types of games.