Spinner as 2-way?

[ericball]

Does anyone know of any way (hardware or software) to use a spinner as a 2-way joystick (or 2 buttons) in MAME?

[pointdablame]

spinners mimic a mouse axis, not a button press, so I wouldn't think it would be possible to do.  I've never personally heard of software or hardware that can map a mouse movement to a button press, but if it exists, someone on this board probably knows about it

[moonpatrol 4 lyfe]

Hit TAB while in the game.  Select Player 1 left, hit enter.  Then spin your spinner to the left.  Then select Player 2 left, hit enter.  THen spin your spinner to the right.

Not sure if this will work, but give it a shot.

Bill

[pointdablame]

Hit TAB while in the game.  Select Player 1 left, hit enter.  Then spin your spinner to the left.  Then select Player 2 left, hit enter.  THen spin your spinner to the right.

Not sure if this will work, but give it a shot.

Bill

That won't work. You need to find a way to set a mouse axis up as a button.  If you select say Player 1 left and move your mouse left (essentially what the spinner is doing), MAME won't register anything.

It's definitely harder than that.  I'm still not quite sure it's even possible.

[ericball]

Hit TAB while in the game.

[NoOne=NBA=]

What is the GOAL here?
Is there a certain game you want to play, etc...?

I don't see any advantage to using a spinner as a two-way.
The advantage that spinners have over a two-way is that they can compute distance, as well as direction.
I can't think of any games that came stock with a two-way, that will accept input from a spinner though.

[u_rebelscum]

Hit TAB while in the game.  Select Player 1 left, hit enter.  Then spin your spinner to the left.  Then select Player 2 left, hit enter.  THen spin your spinner to the right.

As pointdablame says, that doesn't work (at least not in MAME32 0.84u1).

Does not work for any mame.  Only works for mice with the analog input of analog ports in mame versions after ~0.85.

If I tap the optic sensors, I can (theoretically) decode the signal into left & right clicks (with each click being a transistion). 

Easy to translate:

 00 <-> 01 <-> 11 <-> 10 <-> 00 (repeat)
^^
| \ - Sensor 1
|
\--- Sensor 2

Only "hitch" is sometimes going left in above sequence is spinning left, sometimes going right in above is spinning left.  But mame can handle that.

I can see three ways to transform those clicks into button/key presses:
1. Each click is a press, possibly with an RC delay.
2. Extending that, as long as the spinner goes in the same direction above a certain rate the button is held down.
3. More of a positional.  So if you spin 10 degrees right, the right button is held down.  This could be done using up/down counters.

This is the hard part.


But I agree with NoOne: Spinners convey much more info than left/right.  Finding the "best" way to lose that info will vary from spinner to spinner, and user to user, and game to game.  Just use a joystick in the first place.

[crashwg]

What is the GOAL here?
Is there a certain game you want to play, etc...?

I can think of one reason somone would want to do such a thing, infact I asked a similar question a while back...

Playing Xybots with optical rotary joy!

[Minwah]

In MAMEWAH my inital mouse code handled the mouse 'digitally' - it just registered each direction and didn't use any analog info...

So it is possible to do, but as said (and why I didn't leave my mouse handling like that) you should just use a joystick.

[ericball]

What is the GOAL here?
Is there a certain game you want to play, etc...?

Increase the number of games I can play on my Tempest MAME Cabinet using the original CP.