TurboTwist 2 spinner for retropie.

1500points

google some best-of sites this morning and was reminded of tac-scan for 2600, along with omega race for mame.

caver01

@1500points Here are a few of my favorite spinner games for arcade:

Blasteroids
Cameltry
Championship Sprint (racing games in general work well with spinner as steering wheel)
Ironman Stewart's Super Offroad
Off The Wall (Sente)
Omega Race
Star Trek
Tempest

Of course, the vector games need to run in AdvanceMAME, but the rest are good in lr-mame2003.

1500points

another thing I learned from a YT vid the other day.
the equation for tempest
The TT2 has a count of 1200.
Tempest has 72.
So you take 72 x 100 then divide it by 1200.
Which ends up at a 6% sensitivity setting.
Apparently the speed setting doesn't mean anything for mouse input.

I compared tempest side by side with a real machine and my Pi machine.
I found that 6% is a hair slow compared to real. 7% is a hair fast compared to real.
So there is likely another piece to the math equation that puts the real value somewhere in the middle of those selectable values.

I had someone who was playing a lot of real tempest at the arcade, and played it a lot in the 80s, try the Pi. They said they couldn't tell the difference between the 2 other than the fancy vector monitor. And they liked the lighter weight of the TT2 better than the heavier real spinner.

caver01

@1500points THIS IS GREAT INFO! I think I tend to mess around with sensitivity until it "feels right" but this is without an actual reference system.

Another question/setting for the mix is the mouse input poll rate. Have you messed with that? It is supposed to help prevent backspin. You can specify a rate at which linux is supposed to be polling the mouse inputs. I edited my /boot/cmdline.txt by appending usbhid.mousepoll=2 to increase the mouse poll rate, but looking back and googling this setting, I am not sure I have the best value.

Given the fine tuning you are doing, I am curious if you can generate backspin with your TT2 like I can. Backspin was a common/known problem back when I was building my system using Windows XP and we solved it back then by adding a registry entry to increase the rate. The TT2 spinners are capable of very high resolution and poll rate. I suppose at a certain point a high enough setting might affect overall performance of the system, but while we are at this, we should do some tests.

1500points

when i had tempest set to 70speed/45% sensitivity, then whip it (whip it good)
it did do a weird backspin erratic thing.
Turning the sensitivity down below 15% solved that and at 7% the player moves proper even with a fast whip.

that feature might help find a gradient which matches real tempest exactly but to be honest the 7% makes a super game experience.

Oh, another side note. I just realized that Tempest looks great using a wells-gardner flat panel monitor with a smoked plexi. and I have the brightness turned completely down on the monitor so you could get an even more intense searing vector look from a flat monitor. the downside is that the thing was $225 US bucks plus $20ish for the plexi from hardware store.

1500points

@caver01 said in TurboTwist 2 spinner for retropie.:

@1500points Here are a few of my favorite spinner games for arcade:

Blasteroids
Cameltry
Championship Sprint (racing games in general work well with spinner as steering wheel)
Ironman Stewart's Super Offroad
Off The Wall (Sente)
Omega Race
Star Trek
Tempest

Of course, the vector games need to run in AdvanceMAME, but the rest are good in lr-mame2003.

Hi there,
Just getting back to playing with the TT2 cab.
Installed Off the Wall with advmame1.4.
I can't get the spinner to work in this game.
Any idea why this game behaves differently or how to get it working?
I tried both joystick and whirly gig in the dipswitch settings.
thanks.

caver01

@1500points There are two Off The Wall games. The Sente one (otwalls) is the game I was referring to. I have not done anything special to get it running on my cabinet other than setting the core options to split the X and Y axes to players 1 and 2 in lr-mame2003. In advancemame the mouse indices have to be correct.

Beyond that, this is a game that uses a joystick for movement and the spinner for the racquet arm.

1500points

@caver01 I meant the one where it is like a modified breakout game.
I've played a real one and know it is just a spinner and buttons.

Oddly, the paddle doesn't work on my pi setup for this game, using advmame1.4
All other games are working fine with the spinner setup.
Maybe it doesn't work right in mame.

caver01

@1500points Interesting. It is possible that game is coded to use a different input. Dial? In my experience, most games use Dial and only a handful use Paddle. I basically duplicated my controls mapping to cover all possibilities at this point so the spinners work no matter which input choice was written into it.

1500points

I set all inputs to the spinner, too.

One thing that I noticed which seems odd.
I originally installed the off the wall tennis game.
Then switched the rom to the breakout game.
but the mame UI control list looks suspiciously like the controls that you'd setup for the tennis game.
could the config files not have switched correctly?

caver01

@1500points If we are talking about advmame, and the settings to which you refer were done at the generic level, yes, the settings would transfer, but if the adjustments to sensitivity etc. were made under the one rom, I don't see how it could. A quick look at the relevant inputs in the .rc file should answer this.