Trackball / Joystick troubles

[mahuti]

Did a bit of a search, and couldn't come up with a proper solution to the following problems.

If you have a joystick  (gamepad based joystick.. referred to simply as "joystick" through the rest of this post) and trackball both enabled at the same time you will be unable to play trackball games without the cursor going haywire as long as the joystick is configured, ie;

mouse 1
joystick 1
adstick_device joystick
trackball_device mouse

mouse 1
joystick 1
adstick_device mouse
trackball_device mouse

Using either of these configurations in centipede, the cursor will consistently go to the top left for me. If I set up a centiped.ini with joystick 0, then it will work just fine... since I've disabled the joystick. Well, that's all well and good, but if I play "off the wall" which is a fun little tennis game, it requires joystick and a spinner to work. Any idea how to configure that? You can't use

mouse 1
joystick 0
adstick_device joystick
trackball_device mouse

because using joystick 0 completely disables the joystick. Using

mouse 1
joystick 1
adstick_device mouse
trackball_device mouse

Doesn't seem to make any difference... the game still sees joystick_1_x and inserts it into the analog settings. There are probably only a few games where this matters, but I can't think of a way to disable joystick controlling of the spinner trackball device while still using the joystick like a keyboard device. When I go to the tab menu, i get

Dial Analog Mouse 1 X or J1 X Axis

with

mouse 1 joystick 1 adstick_device mouse, etc.

Why? This doesn't make any sense if the adstick is supposedly mapped to the mouse, not the joystick. From what I can tell, there's no way to just select Mouse_1_X in the ingame tab menu. You can enter all kinds of gibberish, letters, whatever, but no way to get mame to recognize that you just pushed the mouse, and remap to Mous_1_x. Even if I go into the CFG file itself (otwalls.cfg) and type in port newseq blah blah blah into the xml and just set it to mouse_1_x, the joystick still interferes with the trackballs use.

Can any of y'all take a look at this, try to duplicate my issues... see what you come up with. Maybe I've been looking at it too long, I'm stumped.

Oh, and just for clarifcation. W XP, 2.xx ghz processor 1gb ram, relatively large & empty hard drive, mame 98, using GPwiz encoder for a 49-way, optipac for spinners, trackballs, and ipac for the buttons.

Can you think of any other games that require trackball and joysticks/spinners? I'm sure there are a few. At a minimum, this is going to cause problems for people that want to use the buttons from a

[2600]

I believe it doesn't happen to everyone as I tried to test it once and couldn't get it to happen maybe I'll try your tennis game.  (BTW Snake Pit is another joystick plus trackball game that Minwah turned me onto.)

Try editing your default.cfg to so that only mouse shows up.  Just open it up in Notepad and do a find for dial, it will be pretty obvious what you have to chane. Also, you'll either have to delete your game.cfg files or edit the specific ones after you edit the default.cfg for this to work in those games.


Let us know if it works.

[mahuti]

Since I haven't remapped anything, there is nothing in the default.cfg that refers to trackball / dial input.

wait... brb.

[mahuti]

OK. Seems this has something to do with temporary weirdness.

1. Magically the tab menu now recognizes the mouse when I move it. It absolutely did not before. I kept trying and trying, then logged in to my PC from my mac via VNC, and tried it... it worked, and now continues to work. Weird.

2. When I changed the default.cfg to mouse, removing joystick... it (obviously.. or maybe not) did not update already created .cfg files, for instance Otwalls.cfg. I have to either delete that, or configure it separately.

So in the end it seems it was a problem of the mouse not working with the tab menu for some reason... whiched caused me to ignore some obvious things... like deleting CFG files, after editing the default .cfg file.

[2600]

Yeah sometimes the mouse can be difficult to register.  You have to move it awhile or spin it hard for it to register.


BTW, mind telling me what VNC software you are using.  I'd love to access my PC from my mac.

[mahuti]

Both VNC viewer 2.xx and Chicken of the VNC work pretty well on the Mac. VNC Viewer is a bit faster / smoother. Chicken of the VNC keeps a nice list where you can save settings, so both have their pros and cons. On the PC side, real VNC seemed to be the only game in town. For a Mac VNC server, I use OSX vnc or something like that. There's a very short list if you search for VNC on Versiontracker.

They run well enough. They even ran pretty good when accessing my old win 98 500 mhz machine. On my 2x ghz machine, they run a lot smoother. Smooth enough to run / open mamewah, and test mame games from my Mac if need be.

[Minwah]

Probably no help, but FWIW these are the settings I always use (IIRC):

mouse                   1
joystick                1
paddle_device           none
adstick_device          none
pedal_device            none
dial_device             none
trackball_device        none
lightgun_device         none
digital                 none

You'll notice I do not use the 'now recommended' method of enabling mouse/joysticks.  Basically I found some flaws with the new method and found that the above combined with game-specific ctrlr files is the best solution for me.  You might want to try something similar, you could skip the ctrlr files and use the tab menu for testing at least.