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Marble Madness trackball settings in MAME
Xiaou2:
Ive stated this before... that MAME really needs to document the actual arcade controllers. For without the correct controls/settings .. these games dont play as they were intended to play.
I used to play Marble Madnesss a lot... so I personally know that its a game which requires a Lot of fast trackball movement to get the ball moving at a decent rate. There are those people whom have never played the game... or whos memory is "fuzzy".
Yeah, you can crank the settings way up... to make the Marble move much faster with less effort... but thats pretty much "Cheating". Its not how the game was balanced for its Time limits. And being that the game only has a few very short levels... One can see why they made the marble move slow, and need a lot of Trackball movement.
Mame should auto calculate the proper settings based on which controls you select that you have installed:
Trackball Diameter Roller Diameter (Its possible some Trackballs used different sizes, resulting in different ratios), Encoder Tooth / Hole Count, and Opto Type (Probably standard -vs- Arcade Original variants)
These settings should also, if possible, over-ride / disable... any windows acceleration formulas. (or at least pop up a Warning about it)
BTW - Theres a trick that you can do on an Arcade Marble Madness machine... that Im not certain can be done in Mame... When playing with One player, you can use BOTH trackballs at the same time, and your marble will be accelerated and turn far more quickly and accurately. Even this seems like a bit of a cheat... however, the Programmers seem to have left it in there / allowed it ... so...
mimic:
That's why I'm trying to find out what the proper settings are. "Feel right" like PL1 suggested some people like doesn't interest me much (maybe when I'm tired of losing and want to progress further?) Other than that I want an authentic feel.
I never played MM and when I looked at it in mame I though it seems as it requires precision movement but then again it was supposed to suck quarters so maybe they wanted to you to spin a lot so it would be difficult to slow down?
Back to formula on the WIKI page it says for 3" Happ resolution is 167.4 so trying to apply it to the example they have used for tempest that would have to be the last number, no?
so I think in this case is 100 x 24 (tooth count) x4 (multiplier for LETA) / (divied) by resolution 167.4 = 57 = a lot of rolling of the trackball, but it sounds as you guys are saying that how MM felt.
Of course I think ultimate test would be to do what PL1 suggested and try Crystal Castles, because it gives an idea how much movement there should be. If it passes, then I think that's the formula
welash:
Actually, the example for tempest was why I thought it was 100 * original counts per turn / cabinet counts per turn. They say that the original tempest had 72 counts per turn, and they are using a 1200 counts per turn spinner, so the sensitivity is 100 * 72/1200. If you were using a 72 counts per turn spinner in your cabinet, the sensitivty would be 100.
I assumed that the same would apply to the trackball.
mimic:
the 100 isn't really explained what it is exactly, or I am not seeing it? That's why I've replaced the numbers I did.
I'm assuming that where someone wrote sensitivity=100 they don't mean that sensitivity equals 100, but formula for SENSITIVITY equals=
100 x tooth count divided by resolution
Nowhere else is suggested that 100 is sensitivity.
I guess that's why WIKI page is so confusing
I gotta test that Crystal Castles right now
welash:
I think the 100 is 100 percent. So a value of 100 is 1:1. They didn't want to use a floating point number, so used a percentage. The first link has a little more information about the example he used.