Major Havoc, Oscar Vortex, and MiniPAC?

[Fred Smythe]

So I just finished my control panel the other day, and I was playing Tempest on MAME32 0.79, and it's working like a champ. I decide to fire up Major Havoc, which works fine with my mouse, but I can't get it to work in MAME, even if I crank the Analog Settings up to 255 for both speed and sensitivity.

Anyone have any advice for me as to how to get this working to spec?

[PaulG]

I have the same set-up, and just played that yesterday with the default analog settings (MAME32 v.70).

[Fred Smythe]

I have the same set-up, and just played that yesterday with the default analog settings (MAME32 v.70).

Strange. I find it works fine with the trackball, but the spinner, not so well. On top of being unresponsive, it tends to the left more than the right.Since the trackball is closer to the "roller" cylinder on the original game, I'll just go with that, but I find it odd.

Maybe it has something to do with mouse acceleration in Windows?

[PaulG]

I can't help with that.  I do know I had to ditch the trackball output on the mini-pac  because of massive backspin for everything (Using Ocsar's mouse hack for that).  The spinner has never given me problems.  If you're using XP, I found this helpful:

http://www.tweakxp.com/tweak1084.aspx

[OSCAR]

This is a strange problem.  Since the spinner is working fine with Tempest, it should work just as well with MH.  I also leave the default Analog Controls settings with a Vortex spinner on MH.  I have a Vortex connected to one of my USB mice in my cab, running WinXP and a MAME version that is only a couple releases old.

I've seen it happen before where a spinner/trackball was freaked out in MAME, meaning that it would backspin like crazy only on certain games, but work fine with other games.  I never found the root of the problem, but what fixed it was to completly delete my MAME folder and reinstall a fresh download of MAME, and then put the roms back in.  With the fresh MAME installation, everything worked normal again.

I thought that perhaps the rom.cfg file was corrupt for that particular game, but just deleting that file and letting MAME create a new one didn't work.  Somehow the problem I had was software related, there must have been some file that was corrupt or had messed up values in it, but I never did track it down.

[Fred Smythe]

This is a strange problem.  Since the spinner is working fine with Tempest, it should work just as well with MH.  

I've seen it happen before where a spinner/trackball was freaked out in MAME, meaning that it would backspin like crazy only on certain games, but work fine with other games.  I never found the root of the problem, but what fixed it was to completly delete my MAME folder and reinstall a fresh download of MAME, and then put the roms back in.  With the fresh MAME installation, everything worked normal again.

Yeah, and I do have a tendency to upgrade MAME over the top of older versions, to protect my special folders and what not. I'll pull out the roms and the special folders and give a fresh install a shot...analog control handling changes so much in MAME that it's ENTIRELY possible a support file or obscure setting someplace is goobed.

(It's also possible that this could be related to the Minipac, but the above poster indicated he was running fine with his, so I think your theory is more plausible.)

I will say this: when it's just working in Windows, the mouse pointer moves a lot faster with the trackball than when I spin the spinner. But I'm just using the latest Microsoft drivers, there.

I'll play with it and report back. I know for certain (again, unless it's a Minipac thing, which I don't think it is) it's not a hardware issue, so I'm confident that it'll get ironed out.

[Fred Smythe]

So I tried a clean install of MAME 0.79. Same problem.

Now, like I said, analog controls seem to be one of those things frequently fiddled with in MAME, so maybe an upgrade is in order. Maybe I'll try a seperate install of the new version and see if it behaves differently with MH.

(I'll point out too that my Tempest settings have sensitivity cranked up around 140%, as well, if that matters.)

I'm _assuming_ it's a backspin issue...basically, when I twirl the spinner quickly (this is in stock Windows, outside of MAME), the pointer moves fairly slowly in the indicated direction. I can get a LITTLE more speed out of it if I move the dial slowly and steadily.

As it stands I can live with it, I just find it to be a curious issue. I'd love to hear from someone who has had a similar problem...