Ultimarc: New dual analog/digital interface, A-PAC.

[AndyWarne]

Hi all,

You can check the A-PAC out here: www.ultimarc.com/a-pac.html

It's a new interface which emulates TWO gamepads. The direction inputs can be connected to analog sticks (pots) or switch joysticks and it will auto-detect.

It can of course be used for any other analog controls such as steering wheels, pedals etc.
32 button inputs are available, or a combination of buttons and analog controls.

Look out for our forthcoming range of analog joysticks too!

Andy Warne

[Thenasty]

a must have for analog devices...As always, great work Andy. This is in my BUY list.
Could you hook it up along w/Ipac-2/4 ? It looks like its a ps2/usb connection from the pic.
Now looking at it more caefully, it looks like just USB, so DOS is out of your any O/S decription.

[ripzone]

Cool, now I don't have to order an analog from the USA. 

Any pics on the flight sticks?

Now WE need a lightgun solution.

Keep up the good work.

[Lilwolf]

LOOKS COOL!

I love the idea that the capaciter can be changed per control panel in my setup!

[paigeoliver]

Whoo, whoo. I'm putting POT based spinners on my next panel now!

[KevSteele]

Excellent!

You're always cooking up something cool, Andy. Where would the MAME community be without you?

Kevin

[2600]

Mmmmm!!!  Four Player Warlords

[Hoagie_one]

did warlords use paddles or spinners?

[Hoagie_one]

I guess no one is gonna be buying Dave's AKI interface anymore then?

[2600]

I thought Paddles, and a quick look at controls.dat confirms.


But really, I've got my eye set on this for a yoke and pedals.

[SirPoonga]

did warlords use paddles or spinners?

http://fe.donkeyfly.com/controls/report.php?theGame=warlords

2600 beat me to it.

NOW, were to get an arcade analog flight stick for a reasonable price, BYO steering wheel/yoke, etc...


With all these new products that have been coming out no wonder I say a cabinet is never done!

[clanggedin]

OK.. Let me get this straight. With the A-Pac I can use my Happ steering wheel and pedals with MAME??

[2600]

You can use a happ 270 steering wheel and pot based pedals.  You can use digital pedals too, but those are just like button presses. 

The thing you can't do is a 360 wheel.

[Witchboard]

So it's not compatible with optical analog devices, like 360 steering wheels, trackballs and spinners.

[Kremmit]

I guess no one is gonna be buying Dave's AKI interface anymore then?

Well, each has it's pros and cons:

http://dave.bit2000.com/aki.htm
http://dave.bit2000.com/AKIdoc.html
http://dave.bit2000.com/akifaq.html 
The AKI is $32.99, and ships from New York. 
The AKI supports 5 axes and 14 buttons.
The AKI auto-detects whether or not you're using 5k or 100k pots.
The AKI is available in 9 different hard-coded USB IDs to keep multiple boards from swapping order on boot-up.
The AKI comes with a 10 foot USB cable
The AKI has no shift function.

http://www.ultimarc.com/a-pac.html
The A-Pac costs $39.00, plus shipping from Europe.
The A-Pac supports 4 axes and 24 buttons, and you can add two more buttons for every axis you don't use.
The A-Pac has a shift function, providing for even more buttons.
The A-Pac requires you to determine whether or not you have 5k or 100k pots, and connect the correct capacitor.
The A-Pac comes with a USB cable of unknown length.
The A-Pac's availabillity of different USB IDs unknown.

Anything else I'm missing?  Andy?

[SirPoonga]

So it's not compatible with optical analog devices, like 360 steering wheels, trackballs and spinners.

[GGKoul]

Kremmit, Thanks for the break down.

Andy, are you planning on releasing a PS2 adapter anytime soon?   As I know you have an Xbox one and you said an PS2 would be coming soon.

Keep up the Great Work!!
-GG

[Hoagie_one]

I guess no one is gonna be buying Dave's AKI interface anymore then?

Well, each has it's pros and cons:

http://dave.bit2000.com/aki.htm
http://dave.bit2000.com/AKIdoc.html
http://dave.bit2000.com/akifaq.html

[cholin]

AKI sounds like it had more time put into it (no offense andy) but it's got all the different functions you want to see.  Extra axes, less buttons, I guess thats fine.

[2600]

AKI sounds like it had more time put into it (no offense andy) but it's got all the different functions you want to see.  Extra axes, less buttons, I guess thats fine.

Usually, I keep well away from arguments, but there have been unsubstantiated posts like this or people trying to get others works (Like Andy's for free).

Most of the people who provide are our small community with fine Hardware spend time and thought on their products.  Andy has always supported this community and offered excellent support.  Not to say the AKI is bad, but this thread is an announcement for this particular product.

If you had taken the time, to read the product description on his website it clearly says more axes can be added if there is demand.  And from his comments he clearly picked the one with the most axis's with the least user confusion.

[Hoagie_one]

I'm not knockin his product.  I'm sure its a fine product.  I was just wondering about teh comparison of products.  Maybe we should do the comparison on another thread, instead of arguing which is beter or how much something sucks.  We dont want this to turn out like the GP49 thread.

[2600]

Sorry, Hoagie_one not directed at you.  Not my thread so do what you want.

Some people here should remember that Ultimarc and his competitors are not Sony. They do not sell millions of these things and I don't are trying to make a quick buck. I'd say all have other jobs and this is just a side project.   If you'd rather not have them sell anything and want to go back to hacking a keyboard, keep saying crap that isn't true, trying to steal, or complaining that they didn't respond to your email in an hour.  You'd give them no incentive to provide a product. 

[armax]

I fully agree.  I know we were all raised with the saying, "if you have nothing nice to say, say nothing at all".  The naysaying gets pretty old and gets on everyone's nerves after awhile.  I'm waiting to see the thread titled, "The color red is better than blue".

[AndyWarne]

I have not taken offence at anything here, I have no problem with comparisons with other products.
Nor do I want to knock the AKI interface out of the market, there is room for several suppliers here.
I thought long about adding more axes. The reason I did'nt, at least for the first version, is that the logical layout of the board, with the directions available for either analog or digital controls, and one player per side of the board, would be upset if the board had more analog axes. The board as it stands can be used for MAME with no analog controls at all, without any MAME reconfiguration other than enabling joystick and maybe some assignment of coin and start. So I intended it to be a dual purpose switch/analog interface. It does not necessarily need to be used in analog mode at all.
I think I might do an alternative version, with more of a bias towards analog, possibly 8 analog axes. I am going to stick with the external capacitor because many pots are 10K and there are even some 50K ones out there as well as the more common 5K and 100K.
Andy

[NoOne=NBA=]

I'm waiting to see the thread titled, "The color red is better than blue".

Red IS better than blue, so there's no reason to debate it.

[AndyWarne]

On the subject of having different USB IDs available for multiple boards, this is of course easy to do, but I can't really see the benefit. If there is a request for this I will add this feature.
Multiple boards can be used even if they all have the same ID. Windows does not get them mixed up.
Andy

[Lilwolf]

Andy, why not add the Z to both player 1 and player 2?  So a possible 6 axis...   

btw, I use the 5th axis more then 1-4 on the aki (ok, its really the 3rd).  But thats because the foot pedal is attached even if I'm running a control panel without an analog joystick on it.   (IE, I can use the Z axis pedal with a 360 wheel....and I would have LOVED to add a 6th (player 2 Z-axis). because I have to partially hack a solution for dual 360 steering wheels (since player 1 & 2 x & y are all on my no-cable swappable control panel setup)... and I will never get dual 270's... but don't care really...

[Shape D.]

Can you use the Apac, the Ipac4, and an optipac at the same time?

[GGKoul]

Can you use the Apac, the Ipac4, and an optipac at the same time?

I guess you'll have a USB - Apac, PS/2 - IPAC/4 and a Serial - Opti-Pac.

[cholin]

Can't you use USB for all of them?

[Stingray]

I'm waiting to see the thread titled, "The color red is better than blue".

Red IS better than blue, so there's no reason to debate it.

I'm sorry but you're wrong. Blue is clearly superior, anyone can see that.

-S

[Hoagie_one]

I'm a big fan of green, but i always like the underdog

[u_rebelscum]

So it's not compatible with optical analog devices, like 360 steering wheels, trackballs and spinners.  Except for the Omega Race spinner that is.    That's what the Opti-Pac is for. 

Which is funny that those are called analog devices, when in fact they use an encoder disc which is 1s and 0s

Which is funny that those USB analog joysticks are called analog devices, when in fact they use a protocol which is 1s and 0s.  [/sarcasm]


What makes the mice analog is that they can sense when more than one spoke/gap goes by, and transfer that data.  Spin slow, and you get deltas of 1 and 0.  Spin fast and you get deltas of 4 and 13, 7 and 8, and most values under ~32.  It might be possible to get deltas as high as 127 per mouse send; I doubt they can go higher.

Please don't confuse the people between analog vs digital music (stored as 1s & 0s or not), and analog vs digital inputs (two values on/off, or more than that).

[markrvp]

Andy:

I wish this had been announced 1 week earlier when I started my most recent project. 

I just hacked an old MadCatz Play Station steering wheel which had 10k pots.  (Side note:  it seems a lot of PS2 devices use 10k pots in the analog controls)
I replaced the 10k pots with 5k pots and wired it to Dave's AKI interface.  If I had the A-PAC board is it correct that I could have just used the 10k pots?

[paigeoliver]

Andy, do some more testing as to why different USB IDs are needed. It is because many, many, many computers will randomly swap the order of identical USB devices on reboot. Try plugging in 3 or 4 of the suckers and do some reboots, and turn the computer on and off and such and you will likely find that they eventually end up listed in a different order to windows.

Even if your computer doesn't do that, a lot of them do. This problem drove me insane and caused me to tear up my hacked USB gamepads and buy my first I-Pac YEARS ago.

[Shape D.]

Andy:

I wish this had been announced 1 week earlier when I started my most recent project. 

I just hacked an old MadCatz Play Station steering wheel which had 10k pots.  (Side note:  it seems a lot of PS2 devices use 10k pots in the analog controls)
I replaced the 10k pots with 5k pots and wired it to Dave's AKI interface.  If I had the A-PAC board is it correct that I could have just used the 10k pots?

you'd just have to use the corrisponding capacitor.

[Flinkly]

first, i'd like to say that adding a device numbering scheme would be nice.  the mroe complicated our machines get, the more interface devices were gonna have, and the larger possibility for needing two of these on one comp.

also, i like the eight axis idea.  that way us driving cab guys could always have our pedals hooked up and still have enough inputs for our yokes and analog sticks.

and lastly, how does mame like analog sticks?  do games actually accept this kind of input?  thanks for the help guys.  and keep up the good work andy.

[paigeoliver]

I ordered mine (along with a trackball and a t-stick plus)!!

It is so cool that something new came out right when I was working on a new project.

[JODY]

My only question is concerning the "no calibration will ever normally be needed".  Is the analog to digital conversion going to be able to handle pots OK that have their movement limited by the way they are used in controls?  And pots that have different ranges?

It would seem so by the description, but how does it know what the range is?  Does it still need to be calibrated in Windows?  Is there something in Mame to set?  Hopefully it isn't per game...

[alexbpb]

Kremmit, Thanks for the break down.

Andy, are you planning on releasing a PS2 adapter anytime soon?