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New Product: Opti-Wiz

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ptpeter:
anyone have any idea when this is coming out?

millercentral:
Hey Randy, if you do make a GGG spinner, any chance you'd match its size/mounting holes to the Oscar V2 spinner (says the guy who had metal panels pre-drilled for V2 spinners just as OSCAR closed up shop...)??

KenToad:
Wow RandyT, what a New Year's gift.  I'm really excited about this one, even though the discussion is making me feel a bit dumb. 

I've never hacked a mouse per se, although I did make my own spinner interface by printing out an encoder wheel on a transparency and letting that spin through a cheapo mouse's analog detectors (whatever they're called). 

Here's the question:  What do I need to make this board work with two (or three?) homebuilt spinners?  Is that what those blank boxes on the board are for--attaching the actual analog detectors?  Obviously, more than one spinner would require several sets of the detectors with at least one mounted away from the Opti-Wiz.

Sorry if this question has already been answered and thanks in advance for any help.

Cheers,
KenToad

Tiger-Heli:

--- Quote from: KenToad on January 11, 2006, 09:53:31 am ---Wow RandyT, what a New Year's gift.
--- End quote ---

RandyT:

--- Quote from: KenToad on January 11, 2006, 09:53:31 am ---Here's the question:  What do I need to make this board work with two (or three?) homebuilt spinners?  Is that what those blank boxes on the board are for--attaching the actual analog detectors?

--- End quote ---

Yes.  You can add optical switches to the board and attach the board to your spinner directly (the optical switches face the opposite side).  When doing this, the axis assigned to the onboard optical switches is selected by bridging the appropriate X, Y, or Z pads with a small drop of solder.

You can have a trackball and a spinner connected to the device, or up to 3 spinners.  You just need 4 wires, 2 optical switches and a current limiting resistor for each spinner you want to build and attach.  And as Tiger-Heli wrote, use a version of the software that supports the use of the Z-Axis (.84 and up ?)

While we're on the subject and hopefully as a basis for discussion with folks in the know ( Urebel? )...

Due to a Windows / MAME oddity, the Z-Axis requires a spinner device with a fine encoder wheel spoke pitch, probably at least 72 per revolution.  MAME does not properly implement the Z-axis from what I can surmise.  It does work well, but the sensitivity command is out of scale.  This means that for best results the sensitivity must be set at 1 to 2% when using the Z-axis.

There are a bunch of technical reasons for this, but the Opti-Wiz is not the problem.  Windows uses a WHEEL_DELTA system for reporting wheel events.  Instead of reporting a single "tick" when a mouse wheel (Z-Axis) event occurs, it reports 120 "ticks" (the arbitrarily set value by Microsoft for future expandability), whereas the X and Y axes report only 1.  If I'm not completely off base, MAME should be checking to see what the WHEEL_DELTA value is when using the Z-Axis and divide the values being sent by this value and then perform the sensitivity adjustments on the integer result.  It does not appear to be doing this. 

Hopefully someone can insert this code and submit it to the dev team to get the Z-Axis supported properly.  But the Z is still absolutely usable as a spinner (plus it's cool to use the spinner as a scroll wheel for those long list boxes :) )  It just has limited sensitivity adjustment in that you cannot currently make it less sensitive than the physical spoke pitch of your encoder wheel.

Oh, and to answer another question, these will be available for purchase just as soon as I get a doc sheet written up.  Kremmit and Markrvp did a great job getting info to me and things look to be working extremely well on all the mainstream hardware.

RandyT

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