Posted by Druin on 4, 2000 at 12:52 PM:
In Reply to: Compatibility with optical rotary games? posted by AUX on 4, 2000 at 12:10 PM:
: How well do these sticks work with optical rotary games?
: www.KLOV.com says Caliber .50 used optical rotary joys, different from these Ikari Warrior ones.
: Do they work well with that game too?
Short answer: Yes.
Long answer (the reason):
The thing I noticed about MAME is that even for games that use the same input device, ie the 12 position rotary switch for instance, MAME responds differently to each game...take Ikari Warriors for example, that's the game that I really designed this to play with. I had calibrated the keypress delay times so that it nicely held down the rotate keys for that game and then released them, and all was fine. Then I went and tried playing heavy barrel and time soldiers...suddenly I found that MAME wanted the keys held down longer before triggering. You can try that out with your keyboard, go into Ikari and start pressing one of the rotate keys in a consistent timed manner and then go play Time Soldiers and press the rotate key in the same speed that worked well in Ikari, and you'll find it won't even register (mine didn't) most of the time at that pace, you have to hold it longer.
So I was up for some re-planning, but no big problem. I just need a way to make the device configurable in how long it holds down the switches. After a few hours, I had it done. So now I can configure the rate for games that MAME will have a different sensitivity for.
With Caliber 50, the opposite was true. There were more than 8 rotary positions for the character to come full circle, it looks like there were 12 positions I counter when spinning him around. For this increased resolution, I found that you barely need to touch the rotate keys on the keyboard, so likewise, I just simply adjust the sensitivity on the rotary interface to tell it not to press the rotate buttons for too long, and suddenly it works well. It's all a MAME issue really, but the device will support using the 12 position rotary switch joystick to play either the original 12 position switch rotary games, or the optical rotary game that was tested was Caliber 50 as well. I must be clear that this only means the device can play those games, but it plays them with the 12 position switch joystick, not the optical joystick.
The important thing is that MAME emulates the hardware through 2 keys, left and right. As long as it does this, the rotary joystick can be used to push those left and right keys, so it works in Tron and XYbots too, with perfect results.
I found that the same sensitivity setting worked for Ikari and Guerrilla War, another setting to hold the buttons longer worked for Time Soldiers and Heavy Barrel, and a different setting to only press them a short while worked for Caliber 50. The XYBots and Tron settings were more flexible, mostly user preference moreso than having MAME require different button press times.