TurboTwist 2 spinner for retropie.

caver01

@WoodChucksCNC The config files for each version of AdvanceMAME installed by RetroPie are located here:
/opt/retropie/configs/mame-advmame

1500points

Thanks for this awesome post. I found it via google search and it allowed advmame to work with a TT2 spinner.

BUT I still haven't found an answer for how to get a spinner to work with other Retroarch platforms like NES or Atari 2600.

Is there a way to get a spinner/mouse to work with Atari 2600....for games like Kaboom, Super Breakout, and the homebrew Stunt Cycle.

Thanks in advance for your assistance.

caver01

@1500points I wish I knew. I have not looked into it, but if you find out, please let us know.

1500points

@caver01 said in TurboTwist 2 spinner for retropie.:

@1500points I wish I knew. I have not looked into it, but if you find out, please let us know.

I did more googling and ran across a reference that it needed to be a reminder on github. So it looks to me like it is currently a no-go beyond advance mame in Retropie.

Here is the specific thread that needs comments added to get it supported-
https://github.com/libretro/stella-libretro/issues/22

caver01

@1500points Well now, hold on. The spinners do work fine in lr-mame2003. I thought you might have already known that. Certainly, AdvanceMAME has the most flexibility when it comes to multiple devices, assigning axes and so on, but lr-mame2003 has basic support for 2-axis input. This allows trackballs to work for games like centipede and marble madness. There is also a core option you can enable that splits the x and y among players 1 and 2 which enables two spinners on the same controller to work for games like Blasteroids, or for driving games, etc.

It's still in support of arcade games, not consoles like you suggested, so the same titles are covered, but it is handy to run these with Retroarch to take advantage of other benefits as opposed to just AdvanceMAME.

1500points

updating this thread.

Some benefits of using a mouse based spinner, after experimenting-
--works with all arcade games that used paddle or spinner.
--no dead spots like using joystick axis'
--no calibration needed to make the player have full range movement
--and here is the great one....they work properly in RetroPie using Stella for the 2600 games! Kaboom feels nice and quick.

Now if I could figure out why Stella won't work properly on the cancel mapping to exit out of the emulator back to the Emulation Station menu.
LR-stella uses the retroarch settings to cancel out no problem, but no matter what i try for mapping in the stella UI (tab on keyboard) it will only respond to canceling out with the Escape key on the keyboard.

caver01

@1500points said in TurboTwist 2 spinner for retropie.:

LR-stella uses the retroarch settings to cancel out no problem, but no matter what i try for mapping in the stella UI (tab on keyboard) it will only respond to canceling out with the Escape key on the keyboard.

Is that not adequate? Since the standalone version does not pick up on retroarch hotkeys, it makes sense that it relies on a single key mapping for exit. Are you trying to get out of it using a key combo or a gamepad button?

caver01

@1500points I assume you have seen this which describes the two input modes. Are you perhaps remapping exit in UI.Events mode instead of EMUL.events mode? Just guessing. Maybe a combo would work? Mapping your button/key to a combo event, and then chose to exit/close? I will have to look at this. However, I have a dedicated exit button on my system, naturally mapped to ESC.

1500points

OK, that helped.
Although Keyboard ESC is the Cancel and would take you back to ES, mapping anything else wouldn't do it.
But the EMU UI key was called Quit and mapped to Control-Q, it did allow an alternate mapping to close the game back to ES.
All good.

I tried lr-stella but it doesn't have the Tab UI settings and would only work with the joypad, the mouse controls were ignored. So that is not useful for spinners.

Really impressed with how well the 2600 games work with this spinner. Couldn't be happier.
Thanks for all the insights!

caver01

@1500points I wonder if the lr-stella needs to have a core option enabled to map the mouse to players? It seems like it might need similar features that lr-mame2003 has like input_player1_mouse_index = "0" and maybe something likemame2003-dialsharexy = "enabled". It has not been that long since more advanced mouse input features have been added to retroarch. Now, we need to see these capabilities trickle down to the cores that can use them.

1500points

Stella working great. This particular game image is wrapped up in the bag now.

AdvMame1.4 and Stella were the only emulators needed in Retropie

Atari 2600 short impromptu vid-

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.