problem with trackball/mouse can move outside game/screen/window

Halvhjearne

i recently bought a 3" trackball and it works fine under both windows and ubuntu, but for some reason when i play games in mame with the trackball, it is as if i am hitting an invisible wall before i hit the edge of the screen, making the games unplayable.
a good example would be centipede, most times i can start playing fine, but at some point the movement will be restrictred to the right half of the screen and i cannot move all the way to the left edge.
if i then move as far right as possible (plus some more) i can usually move to the left (or atleast further than before) a few times before it starts blocking movement again.

i was first thinking it was a controller problem, but i already tried with no controllers connected and it is still same problem.
i also tried disabling controllers in retroarch, but that has no effect either.
neither does removing controls in mame settings so only the trackball is configured for movement.

yesterday i accedentially activated the service mode menu of marble madness and when i got to the movement test, i can move the playfield around, but at some point it will get stuck at the edge of the screen and i cannot move it all the way down or to the left.

im am quite puzzled by now, but it seems to me that the mouse/trackball is not "aligned" or "synced" with the playfield on the screen.

any help would be appreciated.

i am currently using latest version of retropie on ubuntu 18.10 with lr-mame2010.

Halvhjearne

has nobody else had this problem with mouse or trackball not being "aligned" with the game?

IanDaemon

@Halvhjearne I have not in Raspbian/RetroPie 4.4/EmulationStation/RetroArch using primarily MAME2003 and MAME2015. Sounds interesting though. Could it be a Ubuntu issue? Do you have a GUI to test the hardware?

Halvhjearne

@IanDaemon

i think its a problem with lr-mame2010 as i had batocera installed before and it had same problem using lr-mame2010.
i tried to build mame2010 to see if i would have same problem, but it failed to build and i shut it down and went to bed.
my thought is that it is either some controller config i missed or is unaware of or a scaling problem perhaps? as it seems like the "mouse" for some reson moves "off screen" and is unable to "come back" to the actual field its supposed to move in.
really wierd imho.

Halvhjearne

regular mame does not seem to have this problem.

is lr-mame2010 running in fullscreen and if not, is there a way to force it to run in fullscreen somehow?

Halvhjearne

after playing around with this for a while now, i am now certain that this is a problem with lr-mame2010 allowing the mouse outside the "window" where the game is played.

is there a way to lock the mouse to the current game/"window"?

Halvhjearne

can someone please help me find a way to lock the mouse to the screen/window/game?

is there a mame or retroarch option for this?

IanDaemon

I have not had this problem, although I play full-screen and not in a windowed mode. Could that be the issue?

Halvhjearne

@IanDaemon

its possible that it is not, but i somehow managed to start centipede in a 1:1 window and i saw the cursor move off the screen and the movement stop in game, when it hit the edge of the screen.
thats how i know this is the problem.

tbh i would really prefer to just lock the mouse to the current game.
but if thats not possible, how can i force fullscreen?

leehowarth

@Halvhjearne Did you manage to get this sorted?

I have a similar issue where using a trackpad or trackball with Centipede running on MAME 2003 stops moving left around the center of the screen.

Running on laptop PC with Ubuntu.

Thanks

Lee

tomguy111

Did anyone find a solution to this issue? I have recently moved my arcade box from a raspberry pi running retropie to a PC running ubuntu and retropie. The trackball is the same. It worked fine on the Raspberry pi, but on the PC, I now have this issue. Its making Centipede and Millipede unplayable. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I am currently in full-screen mode.

mitu

@tomguy111 By default, RetroArch doesn't 'grab' the emulator window when is in fullscreen mode and this causes the mouse to move out of the window. You can tell RetroArch to 'grab' the window by pressing F11, but currently there's no configuration to do this by default.
In the next RetroArch version, I think it automatically grabs the window when fullscreen is active, so this issue shouldn't come up.

tomguy111

@mitu hi, thanks for the reply. Is there required timing on when I should press F11? Tried it while in the game as well as while launching. Neither seem to have addressed the issue.

mitu

@tomguy111 said in problem with trackball/mouse can move outside game/screen/window:

Is there required timing on when I should press F11?

If we're talking about the same issue, then pressing during gameplay should be fine. But maybe there's a different issue, if F11 doesn't solve the problem.

tomguy111

@mitu thanks for your help. Has anyone successfully gotten a trackball to work on Ubuntu/retropie? It’s very disappointing to me and is definitely a showstopper for this platform. I will either have to switch back to the raspberry pi, or find a new platform to go with. I’d be willing to try another pc, reload the system, or other solution, but not sure if this is the recommended platform for a cabinet build running on a pc. Thoughts?

Zoyx

Old thread, old problem. My trackball is hitting a "wall" when moving to the left in a game like Centipede, just like others have described above. I didn't have this problem with my raspberry pi. I just installed Retropie on my Ubuntu system, and I have this problem. Looks like this problem is 2 years, hope it gets solved soon.

Edit: I think the problem is that Retropie is behind in updating retroarch. Retropie is currently using 1.8.8 of retroarch. From reading, looks like 1.9.0 or later has the fix for this. So how soon will retropie update to this latest version of retroarch?

Edit 2.5 years later: Adding video_windowed_fullscreen = "false" worked! (see post below)

gaz

@zoyx Try adding video_windowed_fullscreen = "false" to /opt/Retropie/configs/all/retroarch.cfg. This fixed the issue for me on Ubuntu 20 on x64. You'll also want to make sure this isn't being set to true in any of your directory or game specific config files, because they will override this setting.