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Imperial Trackball From Ebay Problems
foosguy27:
I finally finished my Mame cabinet a few days ago. It only took like 6 months, but seemed like forever. Anyway, I bought one of the NEW 3" Imperial Trackballs from E-bay with the PS2 connector and 3 buttons, all wired up. I plugged the unit in and it seems to work OK.
The problem I am having is that when I play trackball games like Capcom Bowling, or Mini Golf if I move the trackball real hard, it doesn't seem to want to register. Let me give you an example. If I push forward real hard in Capcom bowling, the ball will almost seem to go backwards at first, and then slowly roll down the lane. Same in Mini Golf, if I slide the trackball real hard to the left, the ball will go to the right a bit, and then just move a real little bit. I did read a post a while ago from someone else, saying they were having a similar problem. They thought it may have something to do with the encoders or something? These trackballs are apparently what comes in the Golden Tee games and you can hit them as hard as you want in any direction and they seem to be rather precise. I have no idea what is causing this problem. If anyone has any ideas or suggestions, it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for your time.
Brian
rampy:
sounds like backspin... (I assume the effect of spinning it "hard" is that it spins "fast")
hmm... one small trick that might help for the bowling game (for me it did anyways - I have an imperial betson but not ps/2 version) was to adjust the dipswitch setting in capcom bowling. There's a setting for trackball size, aparentely if someone converted a game with a smaller trackball you could compensate via dipswitch (in the real deal)...
I dunno what else to tell ya... is mouse accelleration off ?
rampy
Chris:
You may have the sensitivity set too high in the analog controls, so the emulated trackball is backspinning, not the real trackball. Try reducing your sensitivity and see if that helps...
--Chris
MameFan:
What you're witnessing is the same as a bike tire with spokes that is going forward, and as speed increases, suddenly appears to be going backwards as an optical illusion occurs with the spokes moving in just the right time to appear to be going backwards.
By spinning fast, you may be overloading either the original circuitry, or as others said, the psuedo circuity in that the pulses in forward motion exceed the sampling rate, and therefore actually set up a condition for it to look like it's going backwards when in reality it's not.
Since you say these same balls don't do this in a real machine, then I assume the problem is not with their encoders. It probably is in the converter that converts the encoding to the keyboard PS/2 emulator. I know other sites have talked about how slow the keyboard is polled (read by the computer) and that sometimes causes problems with keyboard hacks pressing too many buttons in rapid succession, some not registering. Perhaps the same issue is here in the mouse port.
Mice were never meant to travel fast over long distances.. slow over short distances only. So you are probably stressing out (figuratively speaking) the actual PS/2 hardware, and not even the software sensitivity in Mame.
Perhaps look for a model with USB conversion, perhaps they can handle a faster input rate?
Chris:
USB mice poll at, I believe, at least twice the rate of PS/2 mice.