Optipac vs. USB harness

[slayj]

Another quick question.  I am purchasing a 3 inch track ball from happs and possibly getting an Oscar V2 spinner or Tornado.  The Tornado comes with a USB harness and the Happs trackball is available with one.  Would I be better off going with this option...or........ going with an Oscar V2 and Optipac to connect the trackball and spinner.  Any opinions or preferences out there??  Thanks.

[Tiger-Heli]

Forget the Happ USB option - it's more than the opti-pac.

Do you care if the trackball and spinner are both active (accidentally whacking one will affect your game using the other one)?

Do you mind having a switch on your panel to select the active device (spinner or trackball)?

These answers will narrow down what you want to get.

[slayj]

I would prefer only one to be active and really dont feel like wiring up a switch to go between the two.  So I guess its the opti...........

[Tiger-Heli]

I would prefer only one to be active and really dont feel like wiring up a switch to go between the two.  So I guess its the opti...........

BINGO!  The opti-pac will auto-switch between the spinner and the trackball (If you go with the Tornado, check with Andy Warne whether you can directly connect it's optic board to the opti-pac or would need to replace it with a Happ optic board (I think OSCAR might sell these, or he might have his own boards that will work).

[Tiger-Heli]

I've been looking into this a little more for an upcoming web page.

Note that if you go with the Tornado spinner, you would have to modify it to take advantage of the autoswitching feature of the opti-pac.

If you wanted to save some money - I think you could use two of OSCAR's interface boards and use standard MAME if under 98SE or Analog Plus (or AdvanceMAME 0.96) under XP and map each game to use either Mouse 1 or Mouse 2 rather than the SYSMOUSE so both devices wouldn't be active.

But it's a lot of configuration changes.