[advancemame-users] trackball orientation in MAME (advmame specifically)

[f***@clift.org]

So, I'm setting up a trackball in advmame to work with marble madness. My
mame cab sits in the break room at work. We _used_ to have a JAMMA tetris
machine, and a working marble madness. The competitions for high-score on
MM were long-running and fierce. At any rate, since MM died, I inherited
the trackballs and wanted to make an auxillary control panel for my cab.

The issue I'm having is that with marble madness, the trackballs are
mounted 'diagonally' or at a 45 degree angle. For just about every other
trackball game in mame, trackballs are mounted orthagonally, or at 0
degrees. So, it seems I can please the MM crowd here by mounting one way,
or everyone else by mounting the other way.

It occurs to me that some kind of software mapping could be done to
transform coordinates on the trackball. A few items found by google imply
that the functionality is included in linux's GPM mouse daemon (for some
mice, but not easy to enable for random games.) Is there some way in
advmame to turn on some kind of mapping like this? The math and
computation are very straightforward.

Failing that I might hack on the linux mouse driver to have it provide 2
mouse devices simultaenously, one normal and one rotated 45 degrees and
then I could just configure different games to use different devices. I'm
not much of a linux hacker and it would take a bit of work to come up to
speed on this though. I do FreeBSD dev for a living and I'm not daunted
but the idea, but it will take time that I dont really want to spend if I
dont have to.

So, has anyone else even noticed this issue? Does anyone have a pre-made
solution for me? Thanks in advance for any help you all can give me.


Fred

[Andrea Mazzoleni]

Post by f***@clift.org
It occurs to me that some kind of software mapping could be done to
transform coordinates on the trackball. A few items found by google imply
that the functionality is included in linux's GPM mouse daemon (for some
mice, but not easy to enable for random games.) Is there some way in
advmame to turn on some kind of mapping like this?

You can do it, but only for orientations of 45 degree using a
multiple input mapping. The input mapping allow to use more input
sources and to negate them. For example you can use:

input_map[p1_stickx] mouse[0,x] mouse[0,y]
input_map[p1_sticky] mouse[0,x] -mouse[0,y]

Please note that the documentation of input_map incorrectly
uses "p1_stick_x" instead of "p1_stickx".