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Author Topic: Mame tricking a dial to work like a paddle  (Read 1784 times)

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joeamonuk

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Mame tricking a dial to work like a paddle
« on: January 20, 2020, 10:29:15 am »
Hi.
(first time poster, long time builder)

I work at a Museum in the UK.

we are considering showing an old arcade game called Night Driver in a small driving bundle.
we need to make the controls as accessible as possible so i'm trying to make the software treat the dial input to the style of a paddle input.

Dial only having inc and dec.
Paddle having a center point.

The game seems to work with a control system that would benefit from a center point, but as mame sees it as a dial it means i can't have a reset to center point setting enabled.

I've been looking through forums a fair bit, but it seems to be the other way round in all my searches, (people wanting to set their dial to work like a paddle)

i've been searching through configs for a quick fix, but so far to no avail.
as much as the idea of what i'm trying to do seems normal to me, it is proving otherwise.

so the question is...

how do i either, make mame set a dial in mame to be a paddle?
or
How do i emulate a dial that resets to a center point and can be controlled with something as simple as an analogue stick?

any help or pointing in the right direction would be greatly received.

PL1

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Re: Mame tricking a dial to work like a paddle
« Reply #1 on: January 20, 2020, 04:49:38 pm »
we are considering showing an old arcade game called Night Driver in a small driving bundle.
we need to make the controls as accessible as possible so i'm trying to make the software treat the dial input to the style of a paddle input.
The game originally used a 360 degree wheel (optical), not a 270 degree wheel. (potentiometer)

The steering PCB schematic is on pages 59-60 of the Night Driver manual here.
- There are two LEDs (CR1 and CR2) and two 2N5777 photodetectors (Q1 and Q3) on the steering PCB.
- The picture on page 62 confirms that the steering PCB is an optical board.

If you don't want to use a full-size 360 degree wheel, you can use a spinner like the GGG TT2 or Ultimarc SpinTrak.
- Both vendors sell a mini steering wheel for their spinner.

Any microswitch pedal will work for the gas pedal. (schematic on page 63)

The hardest part of this build is likely to be finding (or fabricating) a suitable shifter.
- Check out this post for some related info about shifters and if you have any questions, feel free to ask in the Driving & Racing sub-forum.

You might be able to fit everything on a U-HID nano encoder.
- IIRC the U-HID offers some configuration options (sending momentary keystrokes) that should ensure a 4-switch shifter works properly with MAME's inputs in Night Driver.


Scott
« Last Edit: January 20, 2020, 05:01:06 pm by PL1 »

joeamonuk

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Re: Mame tricking a dial to work like a paddle
« Reply #2 on: January 21, 2020, 06:28:11 am »
hey,
thank you for the reply, but its not a hardware fix i'm trying to do.
i want the game to play like a 270 steering, preferably with a xbox analogue stick. when the stick is at 0 the steering is at 0.

the angle i am currently looking at as it seems more possible this way is an xbox controller to mouse relative point, so when the stick is center, the mouse is in the original position, so in the emulator i will see it as normal dial mouse controls, but the game will play like a 270 steering control.

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Re: Mame tricking a dial to work like a paddle
« Reply #3 on: January 21, 2020, 01:29:19 pm »
That won't work because that's not how the games or the mouse work.  A mouse is like "2 ticks left" not an exact position, so there's no easy way to translate absolute movement to relative movement.  Why?  Two words... center spring.  Analog wheels have it, so those games just read the joystick data and that's it, but 360 degree wheels spin freely, so every time the car crashes, a new stage starts, or you go into a menu, the steering's absolute position is reset to centered.  So even if you translate analog movement to relative, you have no way of knowing when it'll be reset, thus throwing all those calculations off.  To determine when the steering gets re-centered would probably require a lot of game hacking. 

baritonomarchetto

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Re: Mame tricking a dial to work like a paddle
« Reply #4 on: January 22, 2020, 11:12:49 am »
It would be easier to rewrite the code from scratch