Surface Dial as Spinner

[trizzev]

I'm looking for a simple wireless solution for use with MAME and Retroarch analog dial based games (Arkanoid, Pong, etc.). Has anyone ever tried out the Microsoft Surface Dial for this purpose? It's kind of a steep price tag for experimentation, but worth it to me if it actually functions as an analog device.

[wnholt01]

I was able to get the surface dial working as a spinner in BigBox and Mame. I use in BigBox to scroll the game wheel and select a game. In Mame I use as a dial control. You have to create a custom app in the wheel settings for BigBox or Mame. You then map the left and right wheel spin to a keyboard key combination. Finally for Mame you need to use an AHK script to map the keyboard key combination you selected in the last step to something like the up, down. left, or right keys. You can then configure these keys in Mame input setting for the dial analog dec and inc settings. You must also make sure Mame is set to dinput for keyboard in the ini file, or pass as a command argument to Mame in the launch emulator settings. I tried to map wheel to mouse input, which worked, but unfortunately I couldn't get Mame to recognize the mouse movements for analog control.

Few steps to get it working unfortunately, but the end result is a fairly decent wireless spinner with pretty good sensitivity. You could also fine tune the sensitivity in the AHK script if required. Here is  a copy of my AHK script if interested. I  use Ctrl U and Ctrl D as my keyboard mappings in the wheel settings. 

 #MaxHotkeysPerInterval 2000
SetKeyDelay 0, 50
^u::Send {Up}
^d::Send {Down}

[trizzev]

Thank you. I'll give this a shot.

I actually bought one and had tried to map it to analog mouse and even Z-axis with no success, so I started using it with my main PC. Turns out it relieves a lot of scrolly wheel strain on my mouse hand, so it earned its place already.

[Krakerman]

I tried using it as a spinner in MAME and doesn't work even thou I use mame64.exe -keyboardprovider dinput I can control LaunchBox ok and the menu inside MAME but when running game doesn't work even thou I setup the dial in windows wheel app to keyboard shortcut Left  and Right when launching mame64 unless I am missing something here.

Edited September 11, 2020 by Krakerman

[Bobbyc1056]

Any update on using the surface dial as a spinner in mame?  It worked in scrolling through the games selection screen in mame, but does not work in the games.  I've tried tempest and arkanoid.  Thanks.