Mouse settings for SlikStik Tornado Spinner

[jweaver]

I built my MAME cabinet about 10 years ago and a few later later added a "SlikStik Tornado Spinner" and was totally underwhelmed as I had a few problems.  At the time I tried to resolve them and gave up, but everytime I use my machine I get frustrated by the problems I have and decided to raise this in the hope that someone can help me.

So my problem is that whilst the spinner works OK for fast, aggressive movement.. Its useless for fine/detailed applications.. This is because of 2 things:

1. Poor Resolution
2. Non-Linear Behavour.

I think that the Resolution issue is simply down the the design.. If you turn the knob slowly, you can rotate it about 5mm for every pixel. So there is quite an obvious "dead spot" if you move the knob inbetween its detection points.

But this isn't the biggest problem.. its the linearity that I have an issue with.. If I exit MAME have WinXP running and use the knob to move the pointer.. As I turn it slowly, the pointer moves in an odd way..... Like this
> . > . . . >> . > . > . . . >> (Where > is a movement and . a pause).. So as I turn the knob slowly, the mouse pointer freezes and jumps as you turn it...

Just before i wrote this, I found another post talking about "Mouse Settings" (specifically sensitivity) and I thought I would take a look. in WinXP, there are 11 "speed" settings for Mouse Properties.. And as I tried this, the behavour would change.. At one settings it was like this > . . > . > . . > . >.. And on another >> . > . >>.. So clearly this appears to be a software think.

And to cut a long story short, when I set it to the 2nd slowest speed, it because quite linear.. Perhaps not perfect, but 1000x better than it was....

But the standard mouse settings are global, so now my "mouse" is affected and moves really slowly..

So is there a way to have 2 different mouse settings? Do people use non-standard drivers when having USB inputs (i.e trackballs, Spinners, etc).. And if so, what is recommended?

My fingers are crossed that someone understands what I am talking about and has some thoughts.

All the best

Jon

[BadMouth]

In Windows (XP at least), there is only ONE system mouse.
All mice connected control the same pointer.
All settings affect the "system mouse", of which there is only one.


If you enable multimouse in mame.ini, MAME will ignore the system mouse and get raw input from each device individually.
In this case, windows settings have no effect in MAME.

If multimouse is disabled in mame.ini, MAME uses the system mouse and windows settings apply...but all connected mice show up as one single mouse.

At least this is the way it was last time I messed with this stuff.
I assume it still holds true for newer versions of MAME.

I'm not that familiar with the spinner you have, but if it were me I'd try to modify it to use a higher resolution encoder.
Sometimes you can find used ones on ebay with 1/4" shafts.  I'd make an adapter to couple the newer encoder to the old spinner hardware and then connect it to an Opti-Wiz.

[jweaver]

Thanks for the tip about the MAME.INI file.. I will certainly look at that.

I have played more tonight and whilst things are much better with my new mouse settings, they still arn't perfect as the travel is still not linear.. So I need to do something else.

I was also intrigued about the resolution.. So I looked at the encoder wheel and I have 48 slots.. Considering that the spinner has a radius of approx 110mm, this means that 2.3mm of rotation (or 7.5 degrees) will equate to 1 pixel, so its not ideal.. Although to be honest, its problem the same (if not better) than the technology used in the 80s when games like Arkanoid and Tempest were in the arcade.

I would probably be happy IF I could get the movement to be "linear" where the same amount of rotation = 1 pixel.. If I can get that working, I will be happy.

So I will have a play and report back.

Cheers

Jon