EDMONTON, AB - Billard Controllers Cheap!

[SoundDoc]

Just wanted to share with everyone, I just ran into Princess Auto in Edmonton, and noticed in their flyer they had InterAct Pool Shark game controllers going for $9.99cdn!

I picked up 5 of them, just to mess around with, but to sum it up, their slightly larger than a normal mouse, USB, and have 3 pin standard optical encoders on all the axis (great for mouse hacks). I messed around with one with virtual pool II (included with shark) and all I can say is its definatly going to be a addition to my cab, on a little slide out table on the right.

The nice thing is it has 3 modes of operation for left handed, right handed, or normal mouse action (it swaps x&y) also, when you press button 1, it turns off the y axis on the bottom, and activates the pool cue roller.

Personally, I'm going to forgo the use as a mouse, and mount it firm to the cab slide out table, and use the trackball to line up my shot, and the cue to "stroke it".

Just a nice cheap usb mouse to hack, but makes pool a bunch more fun!

There were 15 when I left, but there were also a few other people in line with them, so I don't know how long they will last.

SoundDoc

[DF]

They have had them in Saskatoon for about a year. Picked up 4 USB gamepads there a while ago (still had a few left of those as well) took one apart and it looks easy to mod as well.

[jerschwab]

Thanks for the tip, I picked up one of these in the Vancouver area today... $9.99 as you said and there seemed to be about 15 or so left.  The also had this programmable oversized mouse thing with like 6 or 8 buttons.  You can assign different key strokes and what not.  Might be a cool thing for MAME if it can be taken apart and hacked.  It should be less than $10, but I'm not sure of the price.

- Jeremy