Arkanoid Doh it Again (SNES) with a spinner?

[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. 

[opt2not]

Yeah I thought about that as well. I want to get the mouse and spinner in hand and see what I’m dealing with here. I was thinking maybe I could transplant the mouse wheel onto the Arkanoid spinner and use that instead of its own wheel.
But if there isn’t a physical hack I can do, I’ll look into a electrical solution.

[opt2not]

Alright, I got my components to start digging into.
Picked up a dirt cheap SNES mouse ($5), and original Arkanoid spinner. I've cleaned up the mouse, but still gotta tackle the Arkanoid spinner.


I've got experience cleaning these spinners up and getting them spinning silky smooth from my refurb cocktail project a while back.


Disassembled the mouse to see what we're dealing with here. Optic sensors on a small PCB, encoder wheels for each axis, and of course the two button switches:




Here's a shot of the encoder wheels and a comparison. Different tooth ratio for sure, if they were closer I might have just tried my physical solution, but it looks like I'll have to go the electrical route.


I've read somewhere that the Arkanoid spinners with taito optic boards are active-high.  I'll have to look up that thread again, but I know there is a way of determining whether the optics are active-high or low, so I'll need to determine that on the SNES mouse. I know i can convert the Arkanoid spinner to active-low if I need to, by introducing a couple resistors on the data lines (again I'll have to find that thread), but I think I'm going to have to try what H_C suggests and tap the data lines from the Arkanoid spinner's board and solder them to the SNES mouse PCB after removing the optic sensors.

For Arkanoid: Doh it Again with the SNES mouse, left/right movement obviously moves your ship, while up/down are used for menu navigation. Left mouse-button is fire/select, and Right mouse-button is pause.  I'll definitely need two push-buttons connected for these, but I'll also need to figure out how to get Up and Down movement translated into button presses. I don't *need* up and down, if it comes down to it, but it's a nice bonus to have so that I don't have to connect a P2 controller to just access menus.

First thing I should do is verify the optic board works on the Arkanoid Spinner. Since I don't have an arcade PCB of Arkanoid to do a quick hook-up test, I'll have to do it the old fashioned way and measure voltages with a multimeter.

More investigation to come, any feedback/suggestions are welcome.

[Howard_Casto]

Actually I think the tooth count is about the same.  The wheel sizes are different but that doesn't really matter.  I think you might be in luck.  For up/down the simplest solution might be to hack a scroll wheel. 

[PL1]

Actually I think the tooth count is about the same.  The wheel sizes are different but that doesn't really matter.

The challenge with using a different encoder wheel is that the distance between the optos has to equal the distance from the edge of one tooth to the center of another.

If you're off by 1/2 the width of a tooth, the output waveform has no phase 2 or 4 -- the encoder can't tell which direction the wheel is turning.


Scott

[Howard_Casto]

Well unless I'm misunderstanding, he's going to use the encoder board that came with the spinner and wire it to the mouse pcb, so that shouldn't be an issue.  My point was I believe it's the same number of teeth, so the resolution of the spinner should be similar. 

[PL1]

Agreed that Opt is doing an electronic hack, not a physical wheel hack.

As long as he works out these two possible issues, he should be good to go.

  1. Are the mouse and spinner active high or active low?

  2. Does the gearing in the Arkanoid spinner increase the rate of rotation enough to cause backspin?

For Arkanoid: Doh it Again with the SNES mouse, left/right movement obviously moves your ship, while up/down are used for menu navigation. Left mouse-button is fire/select, and Right mouse-button is pause.  I'll definitely need two push-buttons connected for these, but I'll also need to figure out how to get Up and Down movement translated into button presses. I don't *need* up and down, if it comes down to it, but it's a nice bonus to have so that I don't have to connect a P2 controller to just access menus.

For the up/down scroll wheel you might be able to adapt the 2-bit gray-code encoder from an Atari 2600 CX-20 driving controller.

It wouldn't be a good choice for a spinner, but should be fine for menus.

Blue and White = wire color in original controller

Black wire is the common/ground

X = continuity between that wire and ground, blank = open

If you break each rotation into 16 steps, the outputs are as follows:

      Blue    White
------------------ First quadrant
01
02                 X
03      X         X
04      X
------------------ Second quadrant
05      
06                 X
07      X         X
08      X   
------------------ Third quadrant
09      
10                 X
11      X         X
12      X   
------------------ Fourth quadrant
13      
14                 X
15      X         X
16      X   


Scott
EDIT: Added diagram.
Blue wire is connected to the contacts on the inner ring.
White wire is connected to the contacts on the outer ring.
Black wire (ground) is connected to the pivot arm.

Scott

[KenToad]

Opt2Not, did you ever get this hack working? I ended up getting an SNES mouse and playing through most of Doh it Again. It's fun, definitely one of the best Arkanoid games. The interesting bit for me is that it supports co-op and multiple mice, although I haven't been able to test that yet, since I only have one SNES mouse.

[opt2not]

No, not yet. it’s still on my list, though. I just been distracted with other projects.

[marioxb]

Would be awesome to see! Too bad they didn't just make the NES Vaus work with an adpater, but I guess it would have been tougher for the Famicom version since it used the Famicom expsnsion port.

I guess it works via emulator, which is cool for an arcade cab. I wonder how well it works though?