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Arkanoid Doh it Again (SNES) with a spinner?

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opt2not:
I’m a fan of Arkanoid. I used to own the boards and spinners when I owned a cabinet with a vertically mounted monitor. Having moved and needing to downsize my cabinets, I’ve conceded to play Arkanoid (1 & 2) on my famicom using the Vaus controller. It’s a great port, and the controller works surprisingly well.
Nintendo made the great decision to support this game by producing a proper spinner controller for a more authentic experience.

Then came the SNES, and an exclusive release of Arkanoid - Doh it Again, but no spinner controller! This game is fantastic, and really could use a proper spinner. I’ve read that it supports the mouse that came with Mario Paint, which got me thinking, has anyone hacked the SNES mouse to a spinner? From the internals of the mouse it looks like it’s just a wheel encoder like the old ball mice.
I’ve been searching around to see if this has been done before, but haven’t found any results. I don’t have an SNES mouse on-hand to see if it’s actually doable, but perhaps someone here has some experience with this old style spinner hack from BITD. I remember people used to take the old ball mice encoders and rigged up our mame spinners, before optical encoders were available on the market. I would assume this would be similar.

Anyone have any insights on this?

Howard_Casto:
I still primarily use mouse hacks for spinners and trackballs on the pc end of things... you can get the old mice for about a buck on ebay anymore.  It's no biggie... pull voltage and ground from somewhere on the board and then the data + and - from the optical sensor traces in the mouse, after des-oldering the mouse sensor of course.  The only issue you might run into is I think the snes controller port only uses 3.3v, which might not be enough to power an arcade pcb.  I think there is a reproduction snes mouse out now which might be a better option, or even better yet just fake the signal with an Arduino and do the whole thing from scratch. 

bigster:
That is a great arkanoid game.  I bought it right when it came out.  I never even thought of using a spinner I guess I always thought of game as a snes game. 

Another possibly cheaper option is to get a famicom to snes controller converter and try the controller you have already.  Ralphnet probably has one but it is also probably easy to wire yourself if you don't mind hacking that famicom controller.

Sent from my SM-G935V using Tapatalk

opt2not:
Thanks for the suggestions guys.

I want to try a more simple approach — get an Arkanoid spinner, remove the optical pcb. Get an snes mouse, pull the pcb out of it and try to fit it into the Arkanoid spinner (somehow), fitting it’s optical wheel into the mouse’s sensor.
Tap the right and left button pads to connect to push buttons, mount it all in a project box and call it a day.

I’ve already found a cheap $10 snes mouse, now I gotta see about acquiring an Arkanoid spinner and see if my plan can be hacked together.

Howard_Casto:
That's probably not going to work due to how small the optical sensors are on the snes mouse and the different tooth ratio ect.  You'll most likely have to use an arcade encoder pc wired to the mouse.  Thinking about it more even that is going to be tricky as I'm sure the game is coded so that you don't have to move the mouse that much to move the paddle compared to a spinner. 

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