having trouble with betson trackball

[emerica]

my trackball is roughly 2 years old and now the trackball is starting to stutter in mame. The trackball works fine in windows. What happens is when I play games that use a trackball, no matter which game, the item your controlling jumps back and forth. An example would be World class bowling. If I go to select one player it will jump to two players and then back to one player. During gameplay, if I move the ball to the left it will jump back to its starting position. I tried to adjust sensitivity in mame and no luck for any game. I even took the ball apart to clean it out thinking that perhaps dust was stuck in the encoder wheels. Any ideas?

[Fozzy The Bear]

sounds like an intermittent wiring fault to me.  Get your multimeter out and buz through each of the wires in there until you find the faulty one.  It could also be a poor solder connection on the encoder boards... possibly dry joint or something like a broken track somewhere. Check that out as well. One last thing to check is that the connector to the PC doesn't have any loose or broken connections in the plug.

Best Regards,
Julian (Fozzy The Bear)
 

[leapinlew]

sounds like an intermittent wiring fault to me.  Get your multimeter out and buz through each of the wires in there until you find the faulty one.  It could also be a poor solder connection on the encoder boards... possibly dry joint or something like a broken track somewhere. Check that out as well. One last thing to check is that the connector to the PC doesn't have any loose or broken connections in the plug.

Best Regards,
Julian (Fozzy The Bear)
 

I agree. I had a similar issue and it turned out to be one of the connections in the case had become loose.

[emerica]

I checked the connections and everything seemed fine. Nothing was loose. I also used the multimeter as Fozzy suggested and didn't find any issues there. I did notice that one of the optic boards got really hot while I was testing it. Hot enough to the point where it was uncomfortable to hold with a bare hand. I disconnected the trackball and connected it again. The board became really hot again. Could it be a bad chip on the board and the heat of the chip is causing the malfunction of the optics? I attached a pic of the optic board that was getting hot. The chip I circled in the picture became really hot.

[Fozzy The Bear]

I did notice that one of the optic boards got really hot while I was testing it. Hot enough to the point where it was uncomfortable to hold with a bare hand.

Still sounds like a wiring fault.... The optic boards should not get hot like that.

Could well be that you had, or now have, a dead optic board. You may be able to get a replacement from "Bob Roberts" or failing that you could get hold of "Betson" directly and see if you can get a service exchange on it. If you're in Europe or the UK then the supplier for Betson parts is "Brent Electronics".

Best Regards,
Julian (Fozzy The Bear)

[emerica]

thanks for the reply...I'm in Jersey here in the states and there is a betson store about 10 minutes from my house. I'll check with them before I check with "Bob Roberts".