Posted by Bill Lash on August 01, 1999 at 16:22:09:
In Reply to: Sorry, it doesn't work like that posted by TwistyGrip on July 30, 1999 at 20:04:39:
: You can *lower* the sensitivity by breaking off spokes and reducing settings.
: The problem is with the *maximum* sensitivity. When MAME and the mouse is set at the most sensitive settings, the controls begins to jitter when you spin it even moderately fast. It's definitely unusable if you flick the knob.
: Spinning it faster (with gears) just makes mouse-driven MAME games jitter worse.
Does this depend at all on the type of mouse that you use and/or it's driver? The reason that I ask, is that in
the old days when I was using a cheap serial mouse, especially on a slow system, or a faster system that was loaded
down doing other stuff, the mouse would jump around when you moved it too fast. I thought there were a few reasons
for that. One was that the system might miss some communication from the mouse, and drop some of info the mouse was
sending back. The other was that the x and y movement were encoded as 8 bit counts, and if the baud rate
for sending the info wasn't high enough, the counters could wrap around before the next sample was able to be sent.
I thought that the newer and better mice and drivers set the baud rate higher and that ps/2 mice were also better
about this.
The reason I ask about this is that I use a mouse when I play arkanoid right now, and I can move the mouse back and
forth from one edge of the screen to the other pretty quickly, without anything jumping around. This would lead
me to believe that if you geared up the spinner some, you might be able to get the same type of feel.
Now I am using Linux with a logitech PS2 mouse under X11/DGA, so there may be some other variables at play here as
well. I doubt that this is a "Linux does a better job than DOS/Windows" thing though, but I could see it being a
"different mice give different results" thing.
I guess the only way for me to find out for sure is to get off my lazy butt and build a twisty-grip using a gutted
logitech ps2 mouse. Thanks to you wonderful plans, that shouldn't be that hard. By the way, thanks a lot for
allowing the plans to be posted, and for generating them originally.