Spinner backspin with usbhid.mousepoll=2 in cmdline.txt
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Hello,
I have been struggling with this for HOURS. . .
I am using a pi3b, a 2.5A power supply from CanaKit, and RetroPie 4.3. I have an ipac2 with a spintrak installed, no USB hub. ipac2 is plugged into a USB port on the pi. I have added usbhid.mousepoll=2 to /boot/cmdline.txt. It's as if it's ignoring this setting. I've tried mousepoll=0 through 8 with ZERO difference in spinner response. Test game is Tempest on MAME2003. If I give it a good hard spin, it will back spin a bit, then kind of hover in one spot, and as the spinner winds down, the game seems to respond correctly. With normal game play, there seems to be a good amount of lag with the spinner. I give it a good spin, and there is a .25 second or so delay before the cursor moves. Then as the the spinner is spinning, and the cursor is following it, I will grab the spinner to stop it. The cursor keeps moving for about .25 seconds. This results in the cursor moving up to three more spaces before stopping. Obviously, .25 seconds isn't much. But it definitely messes with you when playing. An extra 2 spaces after stopping means death when 'avoiding the spikes'.
Other lag I notice is when adding coins. I can rapidly add 5 coins, but it takes up to 1.5 seconds for the coin counter to get to 5. No idea if this is normal or an indicator of an underlying issue. When playing the game, the fire button seems to respond fine. When playing other games, the coin button does not lag as much, or at all. One test was 10 Yard Fight. All controls seem to respond as intended. When playing Tempest, enemies seem to travel at an accurate rate, etc. So I don't think their is CPU lag slowing everything down.
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Thank you.
***** Update: Tested with other games, like Arkanoid, and they display the backspin as well.
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@cakedaddy I have often wondered about the poll rate setting and if it made any difference. Have you tried adjusting sensitivity in the MAME GUI menu? I have found there is often a sweet spot but it takes some trial and error. The lag is a problem though. I notice a tiny amount but I play tempest with AdvanceMAME (better vector graphics).
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I have. It's set to 6% which seems to match the "5 spaces for one rotation" that people mention.
I tried to mess with AdvanceMAME, but was having problems finding the correct ROMS (could only find a massive 65GB file that included EVERYTHING). I'm not sure I loaded it correctly either. Took about 2 hours to download and install. Ran through a VERY long script. I didn't mess with it much because I wasn't confident it would be a good test given the questionable install path I took, unverified ROM versions, etc. That was all done before I reformatted my SD card and started from scratch. So none of the AdvanceMAME stuff is on my build at this point.
The only work around I have right now is not spinning hard. I have to play very calmly, and trying to quickly spin to the other side of the board is not an option. It's a different play style, but, at least I'm playing.
I have spent over 30 hours researching this problem and trying different things. I even played it on my PC with a windows MAME. It had a slight bit of lag with a super hard spin, but no back spin. Since I had to spin it harder than I would during normal game play to see an anomaly, I considered the hardware (ipac and spintrak) working. So, I have an issue with my Pi, SD card (I've tried two different ones), or I'm just missing something in the software somewhere. All of my other games work fine. I just wish Tempest did. Was my favorite back in the day and was a big reason I started this project in the first place.
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@cakedaddy Interesting. Did you install AdvanceMAME from source? I don't think it should have taken that long at all to load the binaries.
If Tempest is your favorite game, you probably owe it to yourself to give AdvanceMAME another try. I don't know if it will fix the backspin issue, but playing vector games at a jaggy 640x480 is a bummer. With Advmame you get vector games to render at your display's native resolution, so the lines are thin and crisp. You can also adjust settings like brightness, flicker, line thickness, etc. Check this out and be sure to click into the images to view them at full resolution to see the difference.
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@Cakedaddy is there any fix for this? Having the identical issue...
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