Seeking troubleshooting walkthru for spinners and trackball for Launchbox and Mame with X-Arcade Tankstick Max (crossposted in Troubleshooting)

[bfraggins]

Hi! Love the X-Arcade Tankstick max. Purchased late December 2024 - also purchased and have installed the spinner upgrade (appears that the board replaced might already have been the upgraded board - If I remember correctly, both boards indicate v 3.0 on the bottom so I think it may already have been upgraded - oh well.)

Regarding the spinners and trackball, there are a LOT of discussions online about folks having difficulty getting these recognized within Mame games running in LaunchBox / BigBox.  I just can't seem to find a clear walk through on troubleshooting steps. Have downloaded and run the java xarcade test program - inputs work passing keyboard presses to Windows as expected. Spinners work independently (x and y axis mouse movement being passed to OS) and trackball works to move mouse pointer (in all directions also in the OS - outside of Launchbox / mame) but neither the trackball nor the spinners seem to be passing thru to MAME or Launchbox once a game is started (e.g. missile command, tempest, golden tee, etc.) Have manipulated mame config file and LaunchBox / BigBox config, but apparently I haven't yet found the right combination of troubleshooting steps to get things working.

Does anyone have access to a clear walkthrough of steps I should be taking to troubleshoot the issues with these? If you could share something like that it would be greatly appreciated. 

Thank you for reading and I look forward to continuing the discussion!

Bfraggins.

Edited January 25 by bfraggins
edited title to indicate crosspost

[bobkbusch]

By now, I hope you have the Tankstick Max trackball and spinner up and running.  If not, I just received my Tankstick and mine work fine.  Here's what I checked in MAMe (.273).

Start Launchbox and go to the Arcade version of Tempest  (it doesn't matter which MAME game, but I chose Tempest for a reason I'll explain later).  Right click the game icon (don't start it yet), and choose "Open MAME .xxx."

When MAME opens, type "Tempest" in the search box at the top.  Then right click on Tempest and choose "Input Device Assignments."  From that menu, change the trackball, paddle, and dial from "Keyboard" to "Mouse."  Ensure you click "Return to Previous Menu," then click "Save Settings."  After that, you now have MAME set for all games with trackball, paddle, and dial controls set to "Mouse."  You can exit MAME and start your game through LaunchBox.

Once your game is running, in this case Tempest, hit "Tab" to bring up MAME settings again.  These will be different menus than the ones opened by the method above.  In this menu, choose "Input Settings" then "Input Assignments (This System)."  Highlight "Dial Settings" and hit delete to remove the current setting.  Then hit "Enter" to set the new Dial device.  In this case, spin either your right or left spinner to choose that device for Dial.  It should say "Mouse #X" or "Mouse #Y" depending on your DIP switch settings on the spinner upgrade board.

After that, hit "esc" to go back one menu and choose "Analog Input Adjustments" and choose Dial Sensitivity.  For Tempest, I chose 9 and it works perfectly...one spinner rotation moves 5 spaces in Tempest.

The process is the same for trackballs.  Also, from what I've read, you don't want to choose any options for "Inc" or "DEC" under "Dial Settings" when setting the device as per above.

Lastly, the reason I'm using Tempest in this example is because of the CPR (Counts Per Revolution) advertised with the spinner upgrade kit for the TankStick Max.  With DIP switches set as default, the spinner should have a CPR of 1600.  If you look at the ArcadeControls Wiki (link provided in spinner upgrade instructions) it has a formula to adjust "Dial Sensitivity" in MAME, based on your spinner's CPR, so it matches the original game.

Using their formula (Tempest has a CPR of 72 and my spinner has a CPR of 1600)  ... (72*100)/1600=4.5    Therefore, the "Dial Sensitivity" in MAME should be set to 4.5 (or closest available... i.e. 5).  This should result in one turn of the spinner moving Tempest 5 spaces.  Unfortunately, in my system, it only moves 2.5 spaces so I have to double the "Dial Sensitivity" in MAME to 9 for Tempest.  It then works correctly moving 5 spaces for one turn of the spinner.

This means either the spinner is only presenting a CPR of 800 or the PC is only sensing at half rate for some reason.  I noted that the instructions provided with the spinner upgrade kit say that a Raspberry Pi has this exact issue, but a PC should work correctly.  For some reason, my PC is only sensing 800 CPR, similar to a Raspberry Pi.  I sent an inquiry to X-Arcade, but haven't heard back yet.

Hope all of this helps and would be curious to hear if you see similar behavior with your spinner presenting at only half the rate it is set to via the DIP switches.

Cheers!

[bfraggins]

Thank you so much for this! The detail is excellent and I appreciate the specifics on calculating the spinner resolution. To follow up, where does one find resources such as this (for example, the default resolution of the spinner for the original tempest, whether or not a joystick game is using a 4-way or 8-way joystick, and such things). Much appreciated and cheers! B.

[bobkbusch]

You're welcome...I hope you have your spinners and trackball working!  As for where to find this info, I wish I had a simple answer, but the truth is, I just slogged through multiple Google searches.  I kept reading and watching YouTube videos until I understood (somewhat) what I was trying to do.  In the specific case of CPR, there is a link provided in the X-Arcade Tankstick Max Spinner Booster instructions to an arcadecontrols wiki.  That site has a lot of very useful info.