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Trackball Booster Kit from GGG and other trackball sensitivity questions
RandyT:
This issue with trackballs is simple physics. There is a roller at the top and a roller on the left. It should come as no surprise that, without a roller of equal mass on the right and bottom, the ball will eventually, regardless of how free spinning the bearings are, or any other considerations, pull up and left. If you are working on making the angled roller in the lower right corner spin more freely as well, you are probably working against your cause.
The only possible things to do is to make the bearings so free moving that by time it starts to do this, the game has long stopped examining the movement, or place very thin shims (start with some notebook paper) under the bearings of both axes at the top left, and see if that helps. If it does, tune it so it does what you want and find a way to make the adjustment permanent. On other thing you could try is to increase the resistance on the angle bearing. Try a single layer of black tape around each, so it makes a tight fit in the holder. You'd be surprised how this can affect how freely they move.
RandyT
VanillaGorilla:
--- Quote ---Try a single layer of black tape around each, so it makes a tight fit in the holder. You'd be surprised how this can affect how freely they move.
--- End quote ---
Good Idea!!
markronz:
I'm definitely going to try all this stuff this weekend! Thanks so much for the tips guys, I will let you know how it goes!
About the black tape, you think electrical tape would be a good bet on the type of tape to use?
RandyT:
--- Quote from: markronz on March 18, 2011, 02:43:17 pm ---I'm definitely going to try all this stuff this weekend! Thanks so much for the tips guys, I will let you know how it goes!
About the black tape, you think electrical tape would be a good bet on the type of tape to use?
--- End quote ---
Same stuff.
markronz:
k, I've gotten a chance to look at this a lot more now. To clarify, I do have two entire trackball setups. I tried both trackballs on the problematic machine. Both perform the same, and the controls are weird and over sensitive.
Then I tried both trackball assemblies on my other arcade machine. Both trackballs worked just fine! They are not over sensitive, so the slight drift (which we've all agreed is normal to some extent of every trackball) does not affect the gameplay. So that means this is not a hardware thing any more. This is a software problem.
What's weird about this, is that when I started the second arcade, I copied over the entire MAME folder from one machine to the other. So we should be working with the exact same software here, as far as MAME goes. Now, just in case, I recopied over the MAME folder from the working machine back over to the problematic machine. This did not fix anything. The trackball is still weird and over sensitive.
Now what I did next was go into the control panel, and compare the settings on both machines. They both look exactly the same, like this:
(Now I know I did not yet disable hardware acceleration yet, more on that later).
So anyway, those settings on that tab appear to match on both machines.
Then next I checked out the driver for the mouse being used on both machines. Both appear to be using the same driver, same version, as shown below:
The lastly, I compared the registry settings from the working machine to the not working one. I changed them so they matched the working machines settings. Those settings are shown below:
After updating these settings I rebooted the computer and tried again. The trackball still acts weird.
So I can't really figure it out. From what I've described above, it seems like the same settings exist on both machines, however the same trackball acts different on both machines. So I'm not sure what to do.
I thought it was weird that the trackball worked on the other machine, despite the mouse acceleration stuff still being enabled. I'm not going to touch the working machines settings. Whatever it is they're doing, it's working. But what I tried to do next was disable the mouse acceleration on the non-working machine. I did this using the direction from the link I posted earlier:
http://kaioa.com/node/68
This actually didn't do much good either.
Also tried this to no avail:
http://www.tweakxp.com/article36785.aspx
So now I'm back at square one. I at least figured out that it's likely a software thing, but I'm not sure what else to try now.
The only other thing I can think of is that I have a more regular version of Windows XP on the working machine. On the not working machine, I have TinyXP installed on there. But I wouldn't think that should make any difference.
Any ideas for me?
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