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dual track balls for marble madness?

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jerryjanis:


--- Quote from: unclet on February 12, 2004, 05:27:27 pm ---I eventually plan on adding 2 more spinners to my cab (for a total of 4) so my friends and I can play 4-player Warlords...... great game.  

I am going to use Analog+ for WinXP to get them all working.

--- End quote ---

For Warlords, spinners work well, but the actual game used paddles which are powered by pots (which I guess you are already familiar with - 6 Dual Strike hacks!?!?  ;D)  I think that there's a substantial improvement in controlling Warlords with a paddle, and a paddle should be cheaper and easier to make than a spinner, as well.  Unless you've got other plans for 4 spinners, it might be worth thinking about making 2 paddles and 2 spinners or something along those lines.

krick:


--- Quote from: jerryjanis on February 12, 2004, 04:27:08 pm ---I think that the DOS Mame can handle 2 trackballs, but it they have to be serial mice.

--- End quote ---

Yeah, I've been putting a lot of thought into this.  My motherboard has 2 serial ports so I think that would be an ideal route.  However, I'm not sure about running the DOS version of MAME.  I'm currently running the Win32 version on Windows 2000.

In a DOS only system, I'd have to give up my wireless USB network adapter and I'd be unable to surf the web if necessary.

Though I suppose I could set up some kind of dual boot with DOS and Windows for that.

What's the MAME performance under DOS like?  Better or worse than under Windows?

jerryjanis:

From what I hear, DOS mame is probably faster for a really old/slow computer without much memory.  Windows will do a much better job of handling memory and loading from the hard disk than DOS if you have a halfway decent computer.

My preferred interface is USB.  It has the widest range of multiple trackball possibilities.

I think you already realize this, but as of right now Mame will not handle multiple trackballs under Windows 2000.

krick:


--- Quote from: jerryjanis on February 13, 2004, 10:41:26 am ---I think you already realize this, but as of right now Mame will not handle multiple trackballs under Windows 2000.

--- End quote ---

*SIGH*  yeah, I know.

I really want dual serial support under win2k.

I think the problem is trying to latch onto the mouse driver functionality.  It's obvious that Micro$oft doesn't want dual mice used.  How hard can it be to write a non-mouse driver that reads from the serial ports and interface it with MAME?




jerryjanis:

Somebody just recently did something very similar.  I played around with it a little, and it shouldn't be difficult to add it into Mame if I have time, and if there's enough interest (sounds like there is - from you, at least ). ;D

Here's a link to my progress page (not much progress yet!):

http://jstookey.com/arcade/cpnmouse/

Here's a thread from a few days ago.  I was hoping to gauge interest in adding support for multiple mice in Windows 2000, but I didn't get much of a response.

http://www.arcadecontrols.org/yabbse/index.php?board=3;action=display;threadid=15884

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