Posted by Mr SaLTy on July 20, 1999 at 13:44:12:
In Reply to: Re: Spinner circuit posted by Ray Ghanbari on July 20, 1999 at 00:33:12:
: : I have four Omega Race cocktail spinners in my possession. They are simple knobs with custom mounting connected to potentiometers. Does anyone know of a circuit I could build to connect these through the mouse port for use with games such as Tempest, Omega Race, etc.
: My Omega Race parts are in storage, but I could *swear* that the Omega Race controller is a quadrature spinner (just like Tempest and what's inside track balls).
: Associated with it are some electronics that decompose the quardrature signal into a counter signal which the main cpu reads and interprets as rotation.
: Are you certain that the spinner is a pot? The encoder could be/is encased within the unit. A free-spinning pot would make the signal processing needlessly complicated (ie, how do you deal with jitter around the wrap around point?) A quadrature encoder would definitely make life easier for the circuit designer.
: If the encoder has 4 wires coming out of it, it is a quadrature encoder and interfacing it to a mouse would be the same as the trackball hacks and spinner hacks. You should be able to ID 5V and ground from the associated electronics, and it doesn't matter how you assign the other two signals to DIR and CLK (reversing them reverses the direction of movement, which you can compensate for in the MAME control configuration)
: If you harass me, I'll look up my Omega Race schematics tomorrow...
: Ray
The Omega Race spinner is a pot. I have an old
Omega Race Control panel and the spinner is
totally different than a standard one like Tron
has. The tron one uses a wheel with a lightchopper
etc. I am converting a tron spinner to a mouse
interface for my project. I have no idea
how to do it with the Omega race spinner
shot of creating a lightchopper wheel for it.
The omega race spinner doesn't have the 'feel' I
like either. That nice weighted feel.