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Any plans or pics for rotary interfaces.

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Druin:

Another note about reliability, speaking of perf boards, even my first real circuit board design wasn't good enough because they were single sided and the joystick headers would have too much strain from plugging and unplugging, with solder just on the bottom side pads to hold it.  it was OK but I had a few boards that were loose and had to have manual jumpers put on.
The reliable product was achieved when I made a board with double sided tracks top and bottom, and the holes being plated through.  This allowed solder to fill the connector hole fully, and overflow on top and bottom board sides, so it held all throughout..  Then the joystick headers never gave a problem again.  

The difference was like trying to hold a 4x4 wooden post in the ground with scotch tape on the ground, vs pouring cement all around the pole in a 4 foot hole.  

I'm looking through my code now, I haven't seen it since over a year ago.  I have it running at 4MHz with an internal RC oscillator (we don't need precise timing on something like this so I didn't care about not having a crystal, and it makes the board and costs easier not to have one).
If I read it correctly, it looks like I am setting my output rotations to last just below 50mSec on each activation....

I'm starting to get interested in looking at the design again now. After so long not thinking about it, I have a clear outside perspective and I may be able to improve some things.  I see some weird stuff going on in that code, must have been lots of late nights.  If I had a lot of time I'd probably try to learn Atmel and get a programming cable made.  I might try to see if I can work on the PIC version and maybe even redo it from scratch using what I already learned, and try to properly write it for 2 joysticks on one chip, then if that goes well, move to atmel.  Then redo the board smaller again and cut the cost.  First I'd have to get settled in the renovation dust for a while.

This reminds me of the Button Box keyboard encoder project, first made on a PIC, then on Atmel.  The schematics and code were freely published and the program seemed to have the modern features we look for in keyboard encoders, programmability etc.  I even bought an atmel chip in case I get around to experimenting, but I never did...even though I could have put some effort into it and had a cheap home made keyboard encoder, I still went and ordered the 4 player Ipac.  And Opti pac, even though I also have working info on making a mouse.   Even without button box full featured code, I made my own small keyboard encoder with a PIC, just with a few dedicated inputs to test it out, and hard coded outputs for those inputs, non programmable, simple just to see if I could communicate........and I could.  Even if I didn't make it programmable, if I just had hard coded keys, and used in circuit reprogramming to change the layout if I needed different keys...I could have gone that route, but I preferred to buy the proper industry standard boards because it's easier and someone else already put the time that I'd have to put into figuring out the little things.  It was a good feeling the day I plugged into the PS/2 keyboard port with a chip and grounded a wire and saw "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa" show up on the DOS prompt, but that's about all I was willing to put into it.   Laziness prevails.

spidermonkey:

Druin, its nice to see your lurking around here again. :). I just received your board a couple weeks ago ands its worth every penny. I wouldn't give any of your info away because its your design and we wouldn't have been able to use rotarys over the past couple of years if it wasn't for you.

Druin:

I managed to make it back to the message boards since I've been on vacation days plus christmas days off, consecutive, and after doing a pile of catching up on life, I find myself with insomnia like the good days, where I had nothing to wake up for, no school, no work, so I stayed up all night.  This is my 4th or 5th night in a row where I probably can't sleep until after sunrise, so what better way to spend it than pondering controls and cabinets...and trying to build up 0.78 files...grrrrr  

Howard_Casto:

I know some people will only use the ls-30s but did anyone think of using the optical rotary sticks?  They are exactly the same physically, give roughly the same input (in terms of mame at least)  and ALL rotary games in mame have native optical support (read have been hacked to use optical inputs)... meaning instead of wasting 20 inputs or fudging with what some of you guys are calling a slightly imperfect interface board all you have to do is hack a mouse.

I'm all about the arcade purity, but in terms of actual gameplay, the only diff I can tell between the two sticks is the distinctive clicks of the mechanical one.  (Although some on this board have tried to convince me otherwise.)  If you want the clicky noises so bad just put a baseball card in the spokes. ;)

Druin:

I think it comes down to the specific Mechanical Rotary obsession...where no reasoning will make any difference.  I could probably use opticals with no "problem" if I tried, but the fact remains I remember being in grade 9 standing in the mall arcade in front of Guerrilla war, and it was the first time I saw those yellow joysticks, thought they were funny looking, so I put in a quarter and then realized you can aim by rotating them, and that was all a part of the fascination with playing the game....since this is a very specific nostalgic element in those games, that's the way I want to play them today.

Likewise, I played Arkanoid a few years prior, and yet I don't have the same utmost obsession over spinners. I am perfectly content playing Arkanoid and Tron using a desk top mouse for input, although I do have a spinner - just not hooked up and no rush for it...

WIth the rotary games it is just a particular obsessive need.

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