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Fixing MAME's handling of 12-position rotary controls
spidermonkey:
Here's a pair of loop 24 optical rotaries. They have an encoder wheel like a spinner but they don't act anything like a spinner. These sticks click just like their mechanical cousins(LS-30s) but they have 24 distinct positions instead of 12 ie "loop 24" . Cal 50 and Touchdown fever 1 & 2 are the only three games that use loop 24 optical rotaries. The rest of Kremmit's list all use 12 position mechanical rotaries. Oh and another unimportant tidbit of info from the mind of Spidermonkey ::)...Both the LS-30S and the similar Loop 24 sticks were manufactured by Seimitsu. Not SNK.
SirPoonga:
I haven't read through all this yet. If anyone needs to know something about the ls30 let me know, I have one.
Minwah:
--- Quote from: RobotronNut on January 30, 2006, 06:31:01 pm ---the cleaner thing would be to create a new input type and model the 12-switch rotary directly, using the CW and CCW keystrokes that you'd get from the druin's thru a keyboard encoder.
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My only problem with this is that this requires the Druin or similar interface, whereas with raw-12 inputs you would not.
Personally I think both methods should be incorporated so everyone is happy, and arcade-accurate-ness is retained too.
Teknique:
--- Quote from: rdagger on January 30, 2006, 11:05:48 pm ---OK, I finally got MAME Analog+ working with my rotary interface so now it is exactly 1 rotation for every click of the LS-30. I felt retarded because I was following all the instructions and I could not get the latest version .9 to work. So I decided to download an earlier version and all the problems went away. It worked perfectly without any adjustments.
I tested every version and it appears that the last one to work correctly with a Druin-type rotary interface is MameAnalog+ ver. 0.83.2.
Maybe I'm still missing something to why the later versions don't work, but anyway Ikari rocks now.
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rdagger,
Can you post your sensitivity settings and anything else you did in the tab menu to make it work as flawlessly as you have so the rest of us can test her out?
Thx.
Tiger-Heli:
--- Quote from: mahuti on January 30, 2006, 05:37:05 pm ---There are 2 types. Optical and Mechanical rotaries. The optical ones are like spinners. The mechanical ones are 12 position, though I seem to recall there being mention of either and 8 or 10 position mechanical rotary as well. The 12 position ones are currently the only ones that anybody ever talks about, Ikari warriors being the primary game.
The sticks didn't have an indicator about which way the stick was supposed to point (i.e no "north" arrow) but you could definitely FEEL the major clicks as you spun your little dude around.
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--- Quote from: Kremmit on January 30, 2006, 06:01:59 pm ---
--- Quote from: RandyT on January 30, 2006, 05:13:11 pm ---Do these sticks have an indicator pointing to the same direction as the on-screen action?
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Nope, but they could. The same side of the stick is always pointing straight up when the character is pointing straight up.
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Let me touch on a couple of points here. Assuming the information on my page is correct, and I think I got it from BYOAC - All the games used a 12-position switch - but, IKARI (and many - ALL??? - other games) only rotated the sprites through 8 positions (45-degree firing). So if you clicked the stick 180 degrees - six clicks - CW - your character should actually rotate 270 degrees and be pointing left. However, the clicks were very easy to feel, so it became second-nature to rotate the stick 4 clicks to turn 180 degrees, and you never noticed that the actual stick only turned 120 degrees.
--- Quote from: Kremmit on January 30, 2006, 06:01:59 pm ---Frontline (and Tin Star & Wild Western) used a 8-way joystick with a knob instead of a regular handle. When you twisted the knob, it rotated an actuator that would contact the correct microswitch(es) to point the gun in the correct direction. You could also call this an 8-way rotary, but it does not use an 8-position switch, but rather 4 microswitches, just like a joystick. MAME already correctly emulates this, with aiming handled by the "P2 Joystick" controls.
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BINGO!!!! - Perfect example of what Mahuti and Minwah and I have been complaining about.
Frontline and Tin Star and Wild Western used a very unique controller that is not available except rarely on E-bay. However, it could be played very authentically using a spinner. MAME does not support the spinner (or really keyboard inputs), but sets itself up to use the actual arcade controls.
Ikari, et. al. used a very unique joystick with a mechanical rotary 12-position switch. These were readily available as NOS until a couple of years ago, and are still quite common on E-bay. The games could also be played using an optical rotary joystick or a spinner, or buttons for rotation. MAME supports the game using a spinner or buttons, and does not (except for Analog Plus and some games) support the actual hardware.
If you ask about these things on www.mame.net, they will say that Tin Star is accurate, and that IKARI supports a dial or buttons because everyone has either a keyboard or mouse.
Our point is that MAME should either consistently support the actual hardware - and let the user figure out how to play the game without it, or consistently support the keyboard and mouse - and let the user come up with their own converters to make the actual hardware work, not some games one way and others the ohter way.