Trackball cursor 'calibration'? Hitting invisible walls????

Kartman

I'm running on a full PC under Ubuntu v18... I've tried multiple cores and all seem to have the issue. I'm trying to get Missile Command, Centipede working correctly. My #trackball seems to be working correctly in that, if I drop out of RetroPie and into Ubuntu, the trackball is moving the cursor just fine.

I've gone into the OS to determine that my mouse index is "2" (i.e. /dev/input/mouse2) to get the correct device.

ROMs seem to load fine and cursor moves correctly with trackball input BUT... the cursor seems to hit 'invisible walls' within the game movement box for the cursor/shooter. Basically, the game is thinking the pointer location is that the edge of the movement box but it's not.

I've searched and searched, finding one other example of the same symptoms but there were no suggested solutions.

Starting to get really frustrated and help would be greatly appreciated.

Kartman

Found a similar post here but no resolution. Seems to be linked to Ubuntu as the base OS?

https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/22331/problem-with-trackball-mouse-can-move-outside-game-screen-window

Should I be switching to so different OS? Windows10????

WHat are others with full PC hardware running on?

Ashpool

@Kartman: I've checked with Centipede on lr-mame2003-plus and advMame:
On my RPie 4, Retropie 4.6.9 with an I-PAC2/U-Trak Combo everything works fine, ...
but on Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS with Retropie 4.6.9 the behaviour of the mouse is really weird.
I may add to your observation, that on my system those imaginary walls/bounding boxes ain't fixed, but change for additional moves and that the directon of the move may be ~~reserved~~ [Edit: reversed] independend from the settings for the analog axes.
Though I can confirm that there is a problem on Ubuntu, i am unable to offer any further help on that :/

Kartman

OK... I'm starting to get frustrated as I feel like I'm going in circles. :)

I've been playing for a couple of days with EmulationStation/RetroArch in Windows. Guess what? Works great... but not as pretty and seamless as full RetroPie install on supported platform. :(

Rather than Ubuntu on my older, repurposed PC... I'm thinking about just buying a supported hardware platform. How much horsepower is required to get an excellent experience (crisp UI, support for overlays and shaders)? Does this issue also exist in Ubuntu on O-Droid devices? R-Pi 4?

macollin

@Kartman

Have you tried grabbing the mouse? It’s f11 for me. I’m running Ubuntu retropie and had this issue with my trackball games (especially golden tee where the swing wouldn’t finish all the way because the mouse was hitting the edge of the screen). I have to hit f11 when I start the trackball games as there isn’t an option to always grab the mouse on open. I never hit this issue with my pi 3. Just with the Ubuntu install.

Hope this helps...

mitu

@macollin I wonder if adding

video_fullscreen = "true"

to retroarch.cfg would make it automatically grab the mouse, thus not needing to press F11 each time.

macollin

@mitu

Thanks for the suggestion I ended up switching over the Advmame for all of my trackball games and that doesn’t seem to have the issue with grabbing the mouse. The only game that I couldn’t run in advmame was golden tee fore 2006 which I run through lr-mame and I do have the fullscreen turned on (despite the setting I still have to grab the mouse).

Ashpool

@macollin Tested earlier with advMame (specs in previous message) and it made no difference.

...will try the F11/video_fullscreen in a few minutes (booting that PC right now)...
@mitu at least in my case video_fullscreen is allready set in retroarch.cfg.

But I noticed, that in regards to the docs page, the only entry in "/dev/shm/runcommand.log" containing the text 'udev' is:

[INFO] [Joypad]: Found joypad driver: "udev"

and 'ID_INPUT_MOUSE' ain't to be found anywhere...

Kartman

@macollin

I've tried everything to get the trackball to behave... frankly, I've wasted hours and hours... :( On the positive, I've learned a bunch. I tried a RP4... this works (no trackball issues) but seems to lack the horsepower to run all my games (lr-fbneo or lr-mameXXXX) with the nice CRT shader.

I've been trying to run RetroPie over an Ubuntu install on an older but respectable PC. Today, I tried multiple Ubuntu versions and even tried Debian 10 (buster). Everything PC based and on various lr-XXXXXX emulators has issues with the 'invisible' walls. I'd LOVE for some one more knowledgeable than me to help explain (and fix).

For now, I'm going to focus on ADVMAME for the trackball games...

Different quesiton: is there an lr-advmame still or does RetroPie install the "standalone" version of v3.9? Lastly, is there a good setup guide around for ADVMAME? I'd like to do an overlay can CRT shader, if possible.

Kartman

For the record... (replying to myself)...

I also tried this week on Windows 10... works fine... :( but doesn't have the major advantage of being a 'supported' platform for RetroPie.

macollin

@Kartman

I have definitely have had the most success with trackball games on Advmame on Ubuntu. However, it comes with its own issues. I haven’t been able to get overlays to work at all (apparently it uses an older Mame overlay system that locks up my games when I try and add).

As mentioned above, the only trackball game I’m not using Advmame for is Golden Tee Fore 06 since it’s seems that will only run with lr-mame. Frankly, I just think the trackball work better with Advmame.