Posted by slube on July 19, 1999 at 20:47:44:
Just wanted to let anyone who's interested know - I had previously posted an idea about using two spinners by assigning each one to an axis of the joystick, to play games that use two paddles. I received good responses, one from Ricky Martin, suggesting attaching it to a joystick (which would be good, because there are definately games that work this way, including an excellent port of Pong I got from DVGC), and a response from Andy Desak, saying he's already done this, so perhaps it can be custom ordered from him at some point.
Anyway, I did some checking with Pong in the Atari Arcade Hits collection, and was surprised to note that it supports using one axis of the mouse for each paddle. I was able to configure it so that when I moved the mouse (or in my case, trackball) up and down, it would move one paddle, and when I moved it side to side, it would move the other one. It would seem that Hasbro anticipated that someone would do this. (You can also set it up so that the paddles are both mapped to the same axis, which would mean that they both move in unison.)
I tried this with Warlords and Blasteroids (couldn't find Pop n' Bounce), but MAME seems to use the keyboard for the second paddle. However, in the controls, these games talk about using Paddle, Paddle 2, Paddle 3, and Paddle 4, both under keyboard and Analog, so I'm not quite sure what's going on.