Optipac and Imperial Trackball issue

[ashardin]

I'm finalizing the build on my latest cabinet, this one is a wedding gift for my old roommate (he doesn't know he is getting it!).  The is the 5th cabinet I've built and I always use the same components, so I'm pretty familiar with the pieces I use.

I've never had this problem arise though.  When spinning the trackball hard (i.e a swing in Golden Tee) the spin is registered as forwards, reverse, and then forwards again, if you spin it hard.  This happens for both vertical and horizontal spins (i.e. right, then left, then right again).  I did a search on this board about this topic and the replies said that Windows is registering the spin too fast, converting it to a backwards motion.  So the advice was to switch the mouse settings in Windows XP so register much slower.  No dice, it still does the same thing, but the mouse pointer just moves more slowly. 

So I starting to think it must be the optical boards in the trackball.  I've got my personal machine that works flawlessly, so I swapped the trackball guts out, I still got the same result. 

Maybe it was a hardware issue, so I swapped pc's (I had my old MAME machine from my cabinet that I just upgraded the PC in it, so I used it).  Same result.

I'm at my wits end, the primary reason for this cabinet is Golden Tee PC, and right now it is unplayable.  Any other ideas or fixes of what it could be?  Somewhere between the optical pickup of the trackball and the computer it is registering it wrong in the middle of the spin.

Any other ideas?  Defective optipac?  I am hooking it up through the serial port, should I find a serial-USB adapter and see if that fixes it? 

Help...

[Tiger-Heli]

Why are you using the serial port, and why would you need an adapter instead of just going directly to USB (or is it the older serial-PS/2 Opti-PAC)

Did you try messing with the analog sensitivity settings in MAME?

Search the board, probably under "backspin".