Spinner Annoyance

[Unkis17]

I was playing some games last night with my spinner and noticed that after a few seconds of inactivity the spinner almost like turns off and it takes a few seconds to kick back in once i start spinning it again.  Is this a wiring problem?  Or is this related due to the fact that i have a trackball on P1 T1 and the spinner on P2 R1 on the same port of the OPTI-PAC?  Is their a way to solve this?  I keep dropping the ball in arkanoid

[AlanS17]

This doesn't sound like a software problem. This sounds like an Optipac problem. I'm not expert since I don't own one, but I would recommend not letting your spinner stop for too long. Wiggle it back and forth even betweens rounds and stuff.

I found this on the ultimarc website:
"The active control (trackball or rotary) is automatically selected using a "first moved" method"

Maybe it's "deselecting" your spinner when you are at rest because it thinks you're switching games or something. Then it might pause when it "reselects" your spinner. Of course, this is all theory. I don't own an optipac.

[Unkis17]

Alans17,

  Thanks for the info.  I have seen that posted before on Andy's webpage.  I know it does the "locking" thing, but i didn't think it drop the device so quickly.  Right now i am just spinning the spinner when i think it is going to die (usually when i die, before my next life starts), but i was hoping their was a better way to solving this, maybe using the second port or something?  I've give this thread some time before I bother Andy, someone may already know the solution.

BTW, I guess I should upload my crest too!

[AlanS17]

You can try splicing the spinner wires directly into one of the trackball axes before they go into the optipac. If this is, in fact, your problem then splicing should bypass the auto-selector. I don't want to say this is your problem, though. I'm no opipac expert.

[u_rebelscum]

I wonder if the trackball is occationally moving a little bit, so if you stop moving the spinner, the optipac sees the TB moving and switches over.  If you're only running the optipac for one player, you could put the spinner on a player 2 port, either TB or rot.  (Or move the TB to player 2.)  This way they won't "steal" from each other.  What's your setup? (USB vs serial optipac, how many TBs and spinners?)

[OSCAR]

I have heard of this "sleeping spinner" problem before, and I have even experienced it myself with one particular Opti-PAC.  I had an opportunity to have a few Opti-PAC's in front of me once, and one of them displayed just this behavior.

What I found fixed it was to move the trackball to the P1 Rotary header, and move the spinner to the P1 Trackball header.  The problem immediately disappeared.  In correspondence with Andy, he told me that priority is not given to a particular header and they should all behave exactly the same, so the reason swapping devices corrected it didn't seem to make much sense.

I have my own theory that on an extremely small percentage of Opti-PAC's (I've heard of only 8 instances so far, 1 being myself), when a Happ trackball is connected to the Trackball header it interferes with a spinner connected to the Rotary header, be it because of dual optic boards on the Trackball header or not, I can't prove that...  However, moving the dual optic board device (trackball) to the Rotary header and the single optic board device (spinner) to the Trackball header corrects it.

Please let us know if this "fix" works for you, because it may help others in the future.

[Unkis17]

OK, hopefully this weekend I can get that done.  I will swap the TB which is port 1 TB1 and the spinner which is in port 1 rot1.  I will not switch ports, just the devices between each other.  I'll let you know what i can get working.

[SirPoonga]

USB?