Heavy Barrel

TheStrayMongrel

Used to love Heavy Barrel back in the day but would have to have one of the most unique control systems with a spinner type control (turns the barrel of the gun) that also acts as a joystick to move the soldier forward. Guessing there is no way to play this game with a conventional joystick setup?

edmaul69

@TheStrayMongrel this is out of stock at the moment, but you can use this adapter with rotary joysticks like the ones in heavy barrel. So you could Make a rotary joystick controller with one.

http://www.ultimarc.com/rotary.html

TheStrayMongrel

Ah okay, probably not worth it for a single game but thanks for the heads-up all the same.

pjft

@TheStrayMongrel You can likely do the same I do for Midnight Resistance: use MAME2003/2010 and set L1/R1 to Dial +1/-1.

It's not ideal, but what it does is it maps a press of L1/R1 to a single turn of the rotary joystick.

It's not ideal - I don't know how many directions Heavy Barrel had, but I'm assuming 8 like Midnight Resistance and Ikari Warriors - but it's manageable.

Forgotten Worlds, on the other hand, has way too many directions for this to be workable, unfortunately.

meanliar

pjft - how, exactly, is this done? My limited exposure to RetroArch is that has general configuration information, but nothing I saw that would allow Dial +1/-1 to be mapped. Is this done via a hardcoded retropie.cfg file? If so, what is the syntax?

caver01

@meanliar Mame provides digital control mapping for analog devices. so that you can use a joystick for what would normally be a trackball, or a steering wheel, or an optical rotary which has very fine relative control like spinner. It may be easiest to simply connect a keyboard and press TAB, and them map these controls for THIS GAME while in the menus. You should be able to map whatever you want to the rotary within MAME and it will be saved for that game. You would not have to bother with retroarch configs.

pjft

@meanliar What @caver01 said is what I'd do. You can press R2 on your controller, and then edit the controls for "this game". I set L1/R1 to those.