Never mind. It WAS working after all.

I had to use the quick menu to bump up the trackball sensitivity.

Once I did that, the game worked fine.

@andros5000 said in Spinner and Trackball Suggestions:

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I have this https://dreamauthentics.com/product/tornado-spinner/ for my arcade machine. It works great with Tempest. I do not have a Trackball but I was looking at this https://www.ultimarc.com/trackballs-and-spinners/ as a possible solution.

@xallius 3rd party images aren't supported on the forums, especially ones that come pre-loaded with game ROMS.

I'd suggest going back to the seller for support, or install the official image from the Retropie site and then the community will be able to assist you.

@mitu

Thanks! This gets stranger.
Originally I was using a MicroSD Adapter to read the card on a built-in SD card reader in an HP Elitebook 2540P I5 laptop running Windows 10. Today, I used a different micro SD card reader (a USB version this time "T-flash USB") - didn't even know I had one, but found it by chance when I was going through my USB drives in order to install gpartLIVE as bootable drive) on the same laptop. When I looked at the micro SD card using this USB reader, disk manager showed the 256MB partition, another space of several gigs, and a large unallocated space (albeit TOO large). I wiped out the partitions (using Diskpart I believe). Then I saw a capacity of 2TB of unallocated space (on a 128GB card!!!). I got gpart to run on my other Retropie SD Card (never actually needed the USB drive) and using the same USB reader, it too reported 2TB for total capacity. Other Linux utilites reported the same capacity. I tried a different SD card in this USB reader and that reader always shows SIZE 2TB, but it does show the correct partition sizes. Now I had the opposite issue - too much space reported. Various partitioning and formating utilities choked b/c I think they were trying to read/write beyond the actual capacity of the drive. On a whim, I put the card back in the original Micro SD card adapter and disk manager showed 116GB unallocated. I created a simple volume and it worked. I imaged the card and the Pi booted. Almost 24 hours later and I'm almost back to where I started. I thought these adapters were just devices which passed the connection through pin for pin with no 'smarts' in-between. Maybe the built-in card reader had an issue? Dunno. In any case, thanks for all of your help.

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The RetroPie Docs have a very detailed chapter about Spinners, Trackballs, Lightguns, Mice .

For the fine tuning of the spinners' sensitivity for each game, I used MAME`s own so-called tab menu that comes up when you press the tab key. See this video about how to do that:

Two more useful references about spinners:

http://wiki.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/Spinners_and_Dials http://wiki.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/Spinner_Turn_Count

@Kartman Hello, I cannot find a good scanline reproduction with ADVMame. It does not use shaders, only overlays. Tried to make a few scanline overlays and had no luck. There are video options for scanlines, but I could not find anything that looked as good as shaders do.

@mahoneyt944 , @Melvin-FoX Thanks for the suggestion, disabling the digital autocenter did the trick!

I decided to update my question, just in case someone comes back to look at this asking the same question I was.

I'm using joystick encoders instead of a keyboard encoder. What I found is that retroarch allows you to setup a mouse for use with the game. So my trackball goes in as mouse 1. Since I do not have a UI running on my setup, I don't actually need mouse buttons. I only need the trackball input for the games.

What all this means is that the retroarch setup will use a joystick along side the trackball... meaning the buttons going through the joystick controller work along side the track ball and I don't need extra buttong for left and right mouse clicks.

Use the core input remapping feature - https://retropie.org.uk/docs/RetroArch-Configuration/#core-input-remapping.

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@whoremoan I believe your post describes an issue I have also been struggling with for some time, but recently made some headway in diagnosing. One thing, though - you included ADVMAME in your list...I haven't encountered the problem with that emulator, but have with the Libretro emulators (LR-MAME2003, etc).

There have been some issues reported in GitHub for Retroarch describing this same problem. For example, see https://github.com/libretro/RetroArch/issues/10780. There is a fix available (https://github.com/libretro/RetroArch/pull/11471) which is not yet available in Retropie, but will probably make it in fairly soon.

In the mean time, one thing you can try (again, this would only be for the Libretro emulators) is to enable the "Game Focus" after entering a game, which usually defaults to the Scroll Lock key (yes, a keyboard would be needed, though I believe you can remap the key within the Retroarch on-screen menus).

EDIT: Though enabling Game Focus can be used as a workaround, after further testing / playing I discovered that using the "Grab Mouse Toggle" instead is often all that is needed (Game Focus locks down keyboard inputs, which may be too restrictive depending on the hardware). The Grab Mouse Toggle defaults to F11 (+ hotkey), but can be redefined in the retroarch.cfg file (input_grab_mouse_toggle = "j", is what I'm using). Grab Mouse does what it advertises, and makes the OS mouse pointer 'disappear' and not interfere with the game's mouse pointer.

jstolarek created this issue in libretro/RetroArch closed Mouse input not passed correctly to the core #10780 sonninnos created this issue in libretro/RetroArch closed Mouse grab improvements #11471

@Wojima said in Override cfgs won't load:

I also have Save Configuration on Exit and Use Global Core Options File turned off.

You should save a game remap file, not a game override, I don't think input controls are saved in configuration overrides - see https://retropie.org.uk/docs/RetroArch-Configuration/#core-input-remapping.

You can also leave the global core options on, if you want a per-game option file, then you can save game options just as you do with overrides/remaps.

@chupachups
I could not remember which of the two screens contained the mouse axis. I think my suggestion for remaps would only apply to items in the Quick Menu -> Controls. Since the mouse axis isn't in there it must be the override that is supposed to save it.

I think there have been reports of some settings not saving correctly as expected. I read someone was able to save settings by opening the retroarch menu from within Emulation Station and therefore no ROM was loaded. Might be worth a try if you haven't already.

EDIT: I can confirm that neither overrides nor remaps will save a mouse index setting for me either.

That's a good suggestion. I added some notes on persistent device paths.

Not sure if it solves your problem but I managed to get mouse working with lr-puae by bringing up the virtual keyboard and there is a button called J/M to switch between joystick and mouse.

@mitu said in Are Multiple Mice Supported or Was That Feature Trashed?:

You can check by looking at the RetroArch's debug log and by running cat /proc/bus/input/devices.
Remembering your first RetroArch debug log, my guess is that RetroArch counts twice a mouse device as both /dev/input/mouseX and /dev/input/eventY. You can check this theory by adding a mouse (so you have 3 devices) and using indexes 0, 2 and 4 to see if each device is detected and working.

Okay. I can see that now, with access to the computer again. (Remember, it's in a different place than my desktop, that I use for posting.) Thanks!

Now I have the primary Mini PAC set in Keyboard Mode and I see that it recognizes the Mini PACs as devices, but also recognizes the devices on them separately. It looks like keyboard in the Mini PAC gets an event node. Interestingly, the Ultimarc SpinTrak (the spinner) gets Event 5, not 6. When I test with cat /dev/input/event6 I get input from the spinner and I don't with event5.

But this shows me that some of the devices are broken down into multiple devices and explains why something else is "in between" the trackball and the spinner.

As a side note, even though this is a built in function for RetroArch, I've now done what the manufacturer claims can't be done. Xtensions claims that, in D Input Mode, you can only have one mouse device, so you can have the trackball (somehow that always ends up as the one to take priority) but not the spinner in that mode. I'll be writing them about that!

When I have all my questions worked out, I'm going to either write up a few blog pages or make a few videos for others with the same issues. I'm hoping that they will use the so their other customers can get this working, too.

I got some controls working with AdvMame. I need to go through and get a few pages on the AdvMame configuration settings, since I wasn't sure what to use to specify controls for the trackball or spinner. I also had a problem because my "Coin One" button pauses the game no matter what. This leads to funky issues. For instance, on one game, I kept trying to put in a coin by pressing that button and it just paused the game. On another game, it would add a coin to the count, but also pause the game until I pressed it again.

I also found that AdvMame can read a keyboard as if it's two controllers. Since I can change my controller from "B Input Mode" to "Keyboard Mode" (I'm guessing "B" means "Button," but I don't know.) From what I can see, just reading the TAB menu on AdvMame, I might have success using Keyboard mode and letting the keyboard act like two controllers.

That also raises another question I'm going to have to spend time searching for: Mame-Libretro(2003) vs. AdvMame. Do I keep both on the system? I'm not sure if they'll both work consistently with the controller in one mode. AdvMame seems to work better, including using sound sample files easily, and the ROM set that works with AdvMame has more games in it. But that's a whole other issue to explore. Ideally I'd like to get my controller working in Keyboard and B Mode in both AdvMame and Mame-Libretro, but if I can get it to do everything in one form, I'll call it a day.

Got it working under Mame-lr2003, but not sure why. See the ending of this thread for my post about it.