Main > Main Forum

Soft switchable 4/8 way?

<< < (2/4) > >>

BobA:
Switchable 4way/8way circuits.

Link

leapinlew:

--- Quote from: EightBySix on November 04, 2011, 10:21:24 am ---But this way, the game in question would never 'see' a diagonal...  So it shouldnt matter how a particular game would react to it....


--- End quote ---

So, you're wanting to create a dead zone?  Wouldn't that equate to no direction being pressed and the character on screen would stop once you hit a diagonal? 

I built a cabinet with a 4 way joystick to solve this problem. I can confirm it did fix my problem of using a 8 way for 4 way games. 

bkenobi:
Maybe I'm missing something, but if you want the diagonals to be ignored completely, you can use a map file (as linked above).  I use one for QBert games and it works ok.  The feeling is all wrong, but it does work.  All the switch does is turn the code into a circuit as far as I can see.  Seems like software would be a simple/more elegant solution.

bkenobi:
As far as what a map file would do, here's an example that's probably formatted wrong.

0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0

There's a simpler form as well, but basically it turns a 49-way joystick into a 4 way with only the full throw counting.  This can also be used for an 8-way stick, though.  With an 8-way stick, there are only 9 positions that count (cardinals, diagonals, center).  If you only want cardinals and center, the diagonals become '0' in the file.  Anything else in the grid can be 1 or 0 and it won't matter since the joystick can't send those positions anyway.  Check out Headkaze's MAME Joystick Map application.

http://headsoft.com.au/index.php?category=mame&page=joymap

RandyT:

This is simply not possible to do well. I've seen devices claim to be able to do it, but the math just doesn't work.  In order to intelligently discern the intention of the player, you need a lot of information from the joystick position to base some decision making upon.  With a  8-way stick, you have 4 switches.  When moving from any of those four switches to one adjacent to it (4-way simulation), your initial dataset has now dwindled to only 2 pcs of information.  In the real world, that's known as a "coin flip".  In the end, you have a 50/50 chance of discerning the intent of the player, so there is no improvement in performance....maybe even a degradation in the end. 

You can use an algorithm or two to "track" the situation, such as: "if the last good direction is UP and the next output from the joystick is UP/RIGHT, then make direction RIGHT", but even this has major problems.  What if the player didn't intend to drift from UP, and hit the diagonal by mistake? What if the last "good" direction was guessed incorrectly?  Again, back to the "coin flip", where one side or the other is more heavily weighted through speculation, but accuracy is not truly improved.

49-ways and analogs have much more info to work with, and are therefore suited to such endeavors.  Regular switch joysticks are, unfortunately, not.

RandyT

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page

Go to full version