Crayola trackball settings in Mame

[Mamezilla]

Hello,

I was just testing my Crayola trackball that I will install in my desktop arcade control in the near future.  For now, I have installed it in one of the serial ports of my machine, and Win2k has recognized it as a Standard serial mouse.  The trackball and my ps/2 optical mouse seems for now to co-exist well, either one works at the same time.  So for testing purposes, I will leave it that way for now.

However while testing it on a game like Centipede, i noticed the the ball was a little unresponsive.  It lacked speed, and if i spun the ball a little hard, the pointer seemed to go slowly, from left to right and the other way too.  I tried to play with the settings in Mame, but it does not seem to have improved a lot.  I even putted the speed at 100 and the sensitivity at 100 %, but i do ot believe it improved the responsiveness in the game.

Is this behavour normal in Centipede ?  I can't remember how the ball in the real game felt.  Could anyone currently using the Crayola trackball give me an input in this topic, and the settings he is using ?

One last thing:  should I keep the serial connection on the ball, or hack another ps/2 or usb mouse and connect it to the ball instead of the serial ?

Any replies will be greatly appreciated.  Thank you !

(BTW, I'm sorry if there are any typos or grammatical errors, since my native language is not english, but french)

[1UP]

I have a Crayola TB.  To start with, the encoder wheels on the Crayola have a very small pitch, the teeth are almost hairlike.  I believe they have somewhere around 40 teeth, and are about the diameter of a dime.  I always had some backspin problems with it in Mame, when I really cranked it fast.

I have since modified the trackball, connecting it to my Opti-Pac, swapping out the optics with a low-res set from a cheap mouse, and cutting the number of teeth by 2/3, also thickening the teeth to help the optics pick up the motion.  This greatly improved performance in most games.  But there is still a problem with Centipede in particular.

When I use my trackball in other games (Missile Command, 720, Major Havoc) the cursor/character is quite responsive, and appears to move in direct correlation to the movement of the ball.  But in Centipede, there seems to be a slight lag--no matter how fast I crank the ball, the ship just seems to move at its own pace.  I have played Centipede on my faster workstation PC also, using an expensive Logitech optical mouse, and the same problem occurs.  It seems to be something Mame-related, as I have played an original Centipede recently, and I can get the ship across the screen much faster than I can hope to in Mame.

By the way, I have tried a variety of settings in Mame for Centipede (I won't post them due to all the hardware hacks I use), and while it improves things a bit, it's never quite the same as the arcade.  A lot of people on this board are having problems with Centipede, using anything from a Comp USA generic trackball, to an Imperial arcade TB.  Cant say why this is...