Xybots on an OPTICAL rotary joy?

[crashwg]

I'll try to make this a short a story as posible and get to the question, but I would prefer that you know exactly how I got to this question.

So, I've been cosidering lately, doing some sort of rotary hack to my t-stick plus similar to mr.Curmudgeon's design.

In my lookings arround I was checking out Druin's encoder board and found a list of games on his site that it works well with, according to Druin.

Here's the page with the list. CLICK ME

I started sorting through MAME, putting the games into a custom folder all the while checking out some of the games I haven't tried before and making sure they were infact rotary joy games.  Well, durring my sort, I came to Xybots and it wasn't listed as having Trackball support as all other rotary/spinner games do, so I popped it open and checked the controls.  For those who haven't played Xybots on MAME, it has a rotate left and rotate right button rather than the "Dial" that rotary joy games.

So I checked it out on KLOV and apparently it uses a joystick that has a self-centering rotation with a button at the limmits of the rotation.

Then it hits me, since Druin's interface sends a keypress for every click on a mechanical rotary it will obviously work with this game, afterall it is looking for a single button press...

Now this is the part that is stumping me.  How would one with a OPTICAL rotary joystick control the rotation?  Is there a different version of MAME that allows for this, analog+ perhaps?  I can't think of any type of program that would allow the mouse axis to be interpreted by the PC as a button press...

I suppose I could just use 2 of the other 6 buttons on my CP for the left and right rotations, but I thought I'd ask to see if it is posible to use a optical rotary first.

[Jakobud]

First of all, why is this thread in Everything Else?  Seems like a good discussion to me.

I don't have an answer for you about the optical rotary stick.  

I am quite interested on how you plan to turn your T-Stick into a rotary controller....

[spidermonkey]

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[crashwg]

First of all, why is this thread in Everything Else?  Seems like a good discussion to me.

I don't have an answer for you about the optical rotary stick.  

I am quite interested on how you plan to turn your T-Stick into a rotary controller....

If a mod want's to move it to the main forum, I deffinitly won't have a problem with that.  I just figgured it wasn't necessarily Main Forum worthy.

I'm not exactly ready to reveal my plans yet as I would like to figgure out if it's going to work first.

I can say that what I'm doing is quite different than what mr.Curmudgeon's but if it wasn't for him I probably wouldn't have ever thought of it.