Update Sept 2010:
I am now selling T2K commander rotary controllers. Here:
http://dannygalaga.com/shop.htmlSince i got back on Friday from my holidays i've done nothing much more than surf for pr0n on the net. So i thought why not do something constructive and hack a Jaguar controller to play Tempest with. I picked up a few old things that had mechanical encoders in them with a view to this. I tend to put things off for ages, but since i knew theoretically this should be really easy i got my arse into gear.
And it works! The only thing i had to fix was swap two wires around to make it rotate the right way. I recommend this to anyone who has Tempest 2000. It's so much better. No wonder Atari went broke when they missed opportunities like making a spinner for Tempest.
I won't go into minute details because it's so straight forward. Just a few tips. Apparently the encoder has to have a total number of divisions divisible by 3. the one i got is 30 (although when i picked up the keyboard i kept counting 29 which didn't seem right).
The controller itself is very hacker friendly. You just need to follow the trace for Left, Right and Common. the mechanical encoders will have 3 tags, or 5 if it has a push down button. connect the middle tag to Common. solder onto the flex wire joints rather than the d-pad thingos. That way it can still be reverted back to a normal controller.
You need to set up the game for rotary, which is explained here:
http://www.mdgames.de/Tempest2000RotarySupport.htmIt's a once off. You will need two controllers to do it, then it's remembered on the cart.
Being an old volume control means it has a detent. that is to say, you can feel soft clicking when you turn it. It also means you can't use it like an arcade spinner where it keeps spinning. You need an optical encoder for that (like from an old mouse). I've found that 30 detents is roughly two and a half turns for 360 degrees, which works out fine. Apparently when Tempest 2000 had the rotary code put in, the programmer was using a hacked indy 500 controller for the 2600. this only has 12 'clicks' apparently. God knows why he didn't code it accordingly...
If you look at the second pic, all i've done is kinda jam the encoder into the d-pad hole with a bit of cardboard behind to stop any shorts. It will hold up for a while but i'll make some kinda disk for it at some stage. It can't be flat, not enough space, has to be dished like a straw boater hat. I could use the d-pad itself but i don't want to drill a hole through it. To use it, i find it much easier to hold the controller upside down so that the 'spinner' is on the right
later i will try hacking an old mouse but i have read somewhere that it's a little problematic on several fronts. One is that you need to power the encoder, and there's not enough power from the controller itself. Personally, i think using a battery will be sufficient. The second problem i've read about is that because Tempest 2000 wasn't coded with an optical encoder in mind, it suffers from 'drifting' in the menu. That is, it's really hard to select what you want. I'm still going to give it a go one day. If it works, i'll set it up in a dedicated controller box which will also have 'pinball' shoulder buttons for the pinball games.
An advantage of optical is that you can make wheels of any number of divisions, therefore it's easy to fine tune the spin. And of course, it will have true spin just like the arcade.
Edit: Forgot to mention. If you are pulling out an old encoder from something, if it's on a little pcb board, best to leave it on there. These things apparently don't like hand-soldering much. The pcb does make it a bit higher though, which will make it stick out of the controller more. But I'd rather that than the encoder dying after a few goes...
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Topic: Rotary controller hack for Tempest 2000 on the Jaguar (Read 5496 times)
