99 replies to this topic

[Velvis]

Is there anyway to use this device with a hacked Xbox controller?
The Xbox controller is standard USB but with a custom connector.

I'd love to play Xbox Z26 with real paddles.

[MegaManFan]

Albert was pulling my leg last night in PM's and told me the price was $50 while I was looking at the PhillyClassic page for it. My first words were, "Hmm - reasonable." Then he told me they were actually $25 at PC5, $30 online and I said, "#%#%." No, what I really said was "At that price, it's a bargain!" So of course he told me I should buy two.

[CPUWIZ]

MegaManFan said:

Albert was pulling my leg last night in PM's and told me the price was $50 while I was looking at the PhillyClassic page for it.  My first words were, "Hmm - reasonable."  Then he told me they were actually $25 at PC5, $30 online and I said, "#%#%."    No, what I really said was "At that price, it's a bargain!"  So of course he told me I should buy two.

LOL, that sounds like Albert.

[StanJr]

MegaManFan said:

Then he told me they were actually $25 at PC5, $30 online and I said, "#%#%."    No, what I really said was "At that price, it's a bargain!"  So of course he told me I should buy two.

This alone should raise PC5 attendence by 30 or 40 people.

[Thomas Jentzsch]

joesmooth said:

@Thomas: From what I understand, it is a software/emulation problem. Reading the data from the trackball and sending it over the USB interface is not an issue.   Also, we spent a lot of time designing the product for joystick, paddle, and driving controller and didn't want "feature creep". We wanted to make sure we had a solid, bug-free device - trackballs can also be supported fairly well by mice (especially the larger Trakball mouse), so it wasn't a completely necessary feature for the product. The joystick, paddle, and DC were.

Agreed.

Maybe they could just add Trakball support via mice to the z26 instead. And maybe I could help there. Eckhard?

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I think Thomas' hacks of Missile Command read a new value every 8 scanlines,...

Every 4th!

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...and you can still spin the ball fast enough to confuse the handling routine.

I don't own a trakball, but I played with a mice and never noticed. I'll check again. But since I am polling every ~250ns, I hardly can believe that this will happen.

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The Stelladaptor sends a USB data packet every 10mS if it detects a change in movement of the controller.

I see, that's fast enough for one packet/frame but not for 80 packets.

[dwh]

Excellent.Just wish I had not just sent a big check for the pre-order games for Philly--There is always the next time I order stuff.
Gonna miss using those arrow keys though--Not.

[mos6507]

Will this adapter allow you to try unorthodox combinations of controllers like the footpedal/driving controller combo that I'm using to develop Death Derby?

What about Booster Grip buttons?

[mos6507]

Thomas Jentzsch said:

Maybe they could just add Trakball support via mice to the z26 instead. And maybe I could help there. Eckhard?

In windows it appears as though multiple mice all get treated as one device, at least as far as moving a pointer goes.

Can one really independently read multiple mice in windows?

[mos6507]

johnnywc said:

Wow - this sounds fantastic!!  I'll be buying a couple for sure.  

Here's a question:

Can you use the Driving Controller to play Tempest on MAME???  That would be awesome!!!  If not, I know that it's a software issue and that MAME would have to be updated to support it.  

Great job to Joe, Albert, the staff at Pixels Past and everyone else involved in finally bringing a product like this to the mainstream!!  It's much appreciated!

Thanks,

The encoder for Tempest is a higher resolution than the Indy 500 controller. I don't think it would work that well.

[joesmooth]

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Will this adapter allow you to try unorthodox combinations of controllers like the footpedal/driving controller combo that I'm using to develop Death Derby?

The Stelladaptor was specifically designed to support the three original Atari controllers - joystick, paddle, and driving controller.

I don't know what your configuration is for a customized controller, so I can't guarantee that the auto-detection will work. I'm assuming you're using the driving controller to steer and the footpedal to accelerate (taking place of the driving controller button). If you're just hacking combinations of controllers to act as a single contoller (or better said: if Death Derby can be played with a REGULAR driving controller or it HAS to be played with a hacked controller), it might work, but it's completely unsupported.

Quote

What about Booster Grip buttons?

Booster Grip buttons are unsupported. We didn't want to risk introducing bugs to our autodetection system, as I've mentioned earlier in the forum in order to add support to non-essential controllers. From what I know, the BG is used in one CBS 2600 game (Omega Race) and just Thrust+ homebrew, so the "need" is fairly small.

Joe

[joesmooth]

mos6507 said:

The encoder for Tempest is a higher resolution than the Indy 500 controller.  I don't think it would work that well.

Though, since you can hack a Jaguar controller with a driving controller to play Tempest 2000 on the Jag, you could use the DC on a Stelladaptor in a Jag emulator (once the emu supports Stelladaptor, obviously)

But, with MAME, I don't think a statement can be made about the DC not working well until someone implements it.

Joe

[JL]

Wow! I've been waiting for years for exactly this device. Ordered 2 as I saw the news. Looks as if my PC Competitors will be put out to pasture. They did a great job supporting 2 - 2600 joysticks, bit that was it. Can't wait to test this baby out on Kaboom and Indy 500.

Regarding Tempest... If you want an exact copy of the Arcade spinner to mount on an Arcade panel or standalone enclosure
http://www.oscarcontrols.com/
I got one of these not too long ago with the replica Tempest knob, and I can't recommend it enough. Works like the real thing with Tempest on MAME, also games like Arkanoid.

[Cassidy Nolen]

I have been watching this for a little bit, but wanted to throw in my 2 cents.

Albert and Joe, I think you may have outdone yourselves. For some of us, this is THE only way we will ever play (or want to play) some of our games. Protos, sealed copies, games we will never own, etc can all be appreciated. I really think this is an exciting breakthrough for our community, and I thank you both for all the time, effort and love that went into this project.

Top notch, priced right, well designed, looks great; what more could you want?

Great job, can't wait to get one (maybe I can get it line for Saboteur and get one at the same time; the table should prove hard to get to!)

Cassidy

[Eckhard Stolberg]

USB cable:
Whethere or not a USB cable will be included with the Stelladaptor is left for AtariAge to decide, but I don't expect there to be one. The Stelladaptor has a standard square B-type USB port though. So you should be able to get a suitable cable much cheaper locally anyway, if you don't have an unused one laying around already.

Xbox support:
If the Xbox can handle any kind of PC USB joystick, you should be able to use the Stelladaptor too by soldering a B-type USB connector to a Xbox joystick extension cable. The emulators will have to specifically support the driving controller and paddle support in the Stelladaptor though. So z26 for the Xbox will have to be updated when the Windows version of z26 with Stelladaptor support has been released.

Footpedal support:
IIRC the footpedal only allows you to substitute the joystick button and directional controls with one of it's three pedals. So for the Stelladaptor it's nothing more than a standard Atari one-button joystick, which is supported. If your controller hack connects anything but the paddles to the paddle input lines, it's most likely not going to work with the Stelladaptor.

Stella for MacOS:
Darrell, I think it might be better, if you tried to port the SDL version of the upcomming version 1.4 of the Stella emulator instead. You wouldn't have to know that much about Mac programming, since the SDL takes care of most of the hardware accesses for you. Also it might make future updates more easy, because the SDL version of stella seems to be the best supported port at the moment.

Trakballs:
The Stelladaptor will support the Atari Trakballs in joystick mode. It currently won't support them in Trakball mode. As far a HID controllers are concerned, mice and joystick are a different class of controller, that need a different driver in the OS. The Stelladaptor pretends to be a HID joystick, so it couldn't start sending mouse data when a Trakball is connected.

It's also not very usefull to send the Trakball data as joystick data to the PC, because the Stelladaptor doesn't update it's state often enough to keep up with the speed of the signal changes in the Trakball. But even if the Stalladaptor was sending it's data fast enough to the PC, the emulator would still have to feed all that data at the right time into the emulated game. This would create a synchronisation nightmare, which would probably slow down the emulator dramatically. I don't think that would be worth the effort.

But if there really is a lot of demand for a Stelladaptor with support for other controller types, and if the first version of the Stelladaptor sells really well, I'm sure Joe can be convinced to come with a clever solution for supporting them in a future revision of the Stelladaptor.

Emulating Trakballs in z26 with PC mice:
I have to generalize the controller handling in z26 a bit to allow support for the Stelladaptor. I guess I could add Trakball simulation during this process as well. I'm not sure if I can finish it for the next release already though. But I'll gladly get back to your offer for help, should I need it, Thomas.


Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

[Danno]

I have two questions:

1. - Will the Stelladaptor support the second fire button of Atari 7800 Pro Line Controllers? If not, could this be implemented later, possibly by myself?

2. - I think this was asked before and wasn't answered - Will the Stelladaptor be available for a while, or do I need to order one now as they will be in limited supply?

Thanks, and yes this is a GREAT idea. Even playing my old 2600 games witha PSX controller using a USB adaptor just doesn't have the "feel" of the old games. I need that big clunky Joystick to make it complete.

[joesmooth]

Danno said:

1. - Will the Stelladaptor support the second fire button of Atari 7800 Pro Line Controllers? If not, could this be implemented later, possibly by myself?

The second button in the 7800 is not supported. We needed to use that pin for autodetection of the paddles.

Danno said:

2. - I think this was asked before and wasn't answered - Will the Stelladaptor be available for a while, or do I need to order one now as they will be in limited supply?  

The Stelladaptor is NOT a limited run. As many will be made as people want and they will always be available.

Joe

[Adrian M]

This explains why Albert was using the USB logo in his avatar a few weeks back.

Interesting device. Perhaps I'll buy one soon.

[hepcat]

Memo to any and all individuals in any way responsible for the production and distribution of this device:

I LOVE YOU!

--Jason

[mos6507]

joesmooth said:

Booster Grip buttons are unsupported. We didn't want to risk introducing bugs to our autodetection system, as I've mentioned earlier in the forum in order to add support to non-essential controllers. From what I know, the BG is used in one CBS 2600 game (Omega Race) and just Thrust+ homebrew, so the "need" is fairly small.  

That's too bad.

I can't speak for Z26, but when reading the Stella source I noticed the "literalness" of the controller handling. There are various objects/classes representing a virtual joystick, etc...

To a real 2600, the controller ports are just that, ports. You have 4 digital signals and two analog signals and two fire buttons per port.

Is a joystick hooked up? Is a driving controller? A 2600 game doesn't really care. It just reads the ports and tries to react accordingly.

Why can't emulators do the same?

Why can't a USB device like this send back packets that simply report the state of the DB9 pins, all of them, at once, and have the emulator simply pass this state information directly to the emulation?

For instance, when using two paddles you are actually using two of the joystick lines since the paddle fire buttons map to joystick signals (I believe it's left and right).

Similarly, a booster grip can be thought of as a combination of a joystick and a paddle since the two extra buttons simply go high/low on the two pot lines.

To me, emulators should just be a bridge between PC interfaces and the actual raw virtual pins on the 2600 hardware. Where the signals are not directly compatible (i.e. analog joysticks, high-resolution mice) then you'd have that wedge in the middle which would do the conversion, but you'd still be able to remap the signals that the conversion resolves to. For instance, you could reverse up and down.

Why should the emulator see something abstracted like "paddle 1 fire" or "paddle 2 fire" rather than something literal like the raw "virtual" state of the pins? The emulator simply puts up a layer in which internally it exposes the program code to the raw bit state anyway.

It's because most of these unusual controller schemes used pins unused in standard configurations that this current approach fails.

With simply trying to pass through the DB9 state as-is to the underlying emulated 2600 chipset registers, it should work (assuming no problems with USB sample speed as explained earlier).

In the case of DD, it takes advantage of the fact that two of the digital bits are never used with the driving controller. It's possible to read the grey-code of the two significant bits independently of the other two and hence use those other two bits for other purposes, in my case a gear-shifter.

I wonder if the USB device identified something like that as a joystick how that would work with a game like DD. The controller ports are still only polled once per frame the way you normally handle joysticks (every 60th of a second for NTSC). I'm thinking it would work just as well handling it like a joystick because by the time the emulator presents the virtual bits to the program it's going to wind up the same.

[mos6507]

joesmooth said:

Though, since you can hack a Jaguar controller with a driving controller to play Tempest 2000 on the Jag, you could use the DC on a Stelladaptor in a Jag emulator (once the emu supports Stelladaptor, obviously)

I've never witnessed how well this works in person but I'm curious about it. I really doubt the feel is close to the coinop Tempest, but it probably works better than the gamepad.

[joesmooth]

The main goal of the design was to be clean, simple, easy to use, and easy to interface. It is a standard HID-class gaming controller and was not designed to be a specialized unit for a particular emulator (or even system). Your idea might work in theory for digital controls (e.g., logic HIGH or logic LOW), but it would not work for paddle data, which is purely analog (based on the voltage of a resistor divider). The beauty of the device is that is can easily be used with other emulators with minimal software changes to them.

Joe

[Thomas Jentzsch]

joesmooth said:

The main goal of the design was to be clean, simple, easy to use, and easy to interface.

Have you thought about a more expensive, more complicated/flexible variation as a future variation?

[hepcat]

I just ordered my copy. I have a PC Competitor Interface so I've been able to use Atari joysticks on my PC for a while now, but I have been waiting years for something like this to come out so I could play games like Arkanoid. Thanks again!!!

--Jason

[joesmooth]

Thomas Jentzsch said:

Have you thought about a more expensive, more complicated/flexible variation as a future variation?

It's possibility, but we won't make any promises. As I mentioned before, this is a hobby, so I need to be careful of what projects I choose, and how much time and effort they require. Even this "simple, less complicated" device was difficult to design and took a great amount of energy.

We just wanted to provide a cool device for people to play standard-type games on their emulators. That was the goal, and we think we did it

Joe

[raindog]

joesmooth said:

The main goal of the design was to be clean, simple, easy to use, and easy to interface. It is a standard HID-class gaming controller

Speaking as a Linux user who long since gave up on porting (or waiting for someone else to port) z26, and someone who can't wait to play all sorts of non-Atari games using Atari controllers (since I frequently used Atari sticks on my C64, Colecovision and Amiga), I very much appreciate this approach.

And so I've ordered two