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720 degrees
bigleechild:
Will a joystick from the 720 degrees arcade game work with a mame system?
kspiff:
Not without a special compile being made. The 720 joystick has 2 optical discs.. 1 is used for movement and 1 is used for calibration.. the calibration disc wouldn't be recognized by MAME and the skater would quickly become out of sync with the joystick.
Too bad, I'd really like to see a solution to this someday.
Lilwolf:
Has anyone modified the source to make it work with a joystick better?
What exactly is the other encoder for? does it just click when it's north or something (ie, something that we might be able to fake?)
I would love to hear it. But even then, I haven't seen a single analog controller that would really work. I wrote a program that would convert a rotating mouse motion into a joystick directional motion that worked very well.. (it kept track of the angles you are moving and what quad you where in to see where you are going.... it really ended up working pretty good). Anyway, I wanted to add it to mame at some point... just never finished it (like all my other projects)
u_rebelscum:
--- Quote from: Lilwolf on February 15, 2003, 04:51:15 pm ---Has anyone modified the source to make it work with a joystick better?
--- End quote ---
SmitDogg had a build somewhere in the 0.5x's that did a digital joystick hack (eight directions to skate). It is possible to do an analog hack. Need to convert an (x,y) pair into an angle (well, delta angle), and it seems you got something like that a while ago.
--- Quote ---What exactly is the other encoder for? does it just click when it's north or something (ie, something that we might be able to fake?)
--- End quote ---
The other encoder has two holes next to each other. It looks like it is an error correction wheel to fix if one or two holes were missed on the normal wheel. AFAIK, it isn't needed in the real game, as long as you don't mind having to recalibrate often. ;)
--- Quote ---I would love to hear it. But even then, I haven't seen a single analog controller that would really work. I wrote a program that would convert a rotating mouse motion into a joystick directional motion that worked very well.. (it kept track of the angles you are moving and what quad you where in to see where you are going.... it really ended up working pretty good). Anyway, I wanted to add it to mame at some point... just never finished it (like all my other projects)
--- End quote ---
Do you still have the code? Maybe I could tool with it and add it to analog+.
Here's the data I have:
The normal encoder wheel has 72 wholes, meaning each hole = 5 degrees.
The other encoder wheel has two holes off sync'd with the normal encoder's holes and spaced 10 degrees apart.
If you ever ran into a 720 machine in the arcades that would get off sync sometimes, this usually meant the non-standard encoder wheel sensor was dead. If it was really bad at keeping sync, that usually meant the normal sensor was on the blink.
Also, directX directInput does not seem to use the mouse accelleration setting in windows. At least on my winMe & mouse drivers. So it may be possible to get a real 720 controller to work on mame.
Which reminds me. Anyone know where I can a replacement pivot ball for a 720 controller?
jerryjanis:
I love 720 and spent some time trying to modify Mame to have better controls. I hacked some changes to enable me to use a joystick and control it so that the skateboarder's direction will match the direction you are pointing the 8-way joystick. If you point north, the skateboarder will immediately point north and if you point southwest, the skateboarder will immediately jump to the southwest. This is how it worked on the commodore 64 and nintendo versions (maybe that's why I'm so comfortable playing it that way). I find that it works a lot better than the way Mame controls it now with a joystick.
Just now I quickly updated the changes I made to Mame version 6.4. I think it's kind of a sloppy job that I did - I'm guessing that it probably breaks a lot of other games, but it works pretty nicely (in my opinion) for 720.
You can download my mame64 source files here:
http://www26.brinkster.com/jstookey/joystick/720mame.html
I also own an original 720 joystick, but I haven't gotten so far as to make it work properly.
I remember playing the regular build of mame with it at one point, and it seemed to work properly for the most part using only the primary analog spinner disc on the joystick, but I didn't play it for long (I get so easily distracted - Mame's a little too awesome).
If only I had the time, it couldn't possibly be terribly difficult to get Mame to work perfectly with the 720' joystick.
No joke, there WILL be a solution SOMEDAY, but I have so many Mame projects that most of them lose priority really easily.