Vortex Spinner on Vectrex

[Dave McCooey]

To Vectrex owners who like spinner games:

I connected an Oscar Controls Vortex Spinner to my Vectrex's left
controller port to see how it would work. For testing, all I have at
the moment are the "spinner hack" games on Andy Coleman's 72-in-1
multicart. These games are written for the Atari driving controller,
which has lower resolution (16 counts/rev) than the Vortex (288 counts/
rev), so the spinner had to be turned very slowly for the games to
read it properly, but it did work.

Does anybody know of a homebrew or hacked game that is written for a
higher resolution spinner?

Best regards,
Dave McCooey

[Kokovec]

For analog games I believe the Vec uses an 8 bit A/D which can give
you the possibility of 256 positions.
The Vec uses successive approximation and is looking for an analog
signal (~7 Vpp).
I'm not sure what the Vortex Spinner spits out but the voltages would
have to match the "staircase" voltage that the Vec is expecting which
varies from Vec to Vec due to slight differences in reference
voltages, aging components, etc.
All this to say that the onus falls upon the controller's resolution
for best gameplay of analog games.

But of course I could be wrong.

[Dave McCooey]

The spinner is wired to GND (pin 8), +5v (pin 7), and buttons 1 and 2
(pins 1 and 2) of the left controller port, so the analog joystick
lines (pins 5 and 6) of the port are not involved. This is the same
way that the Atari driving controller connects to the port, except
that the driving controller doesn't require a connection to +5v (pin
7). Any game written to work with the Atari driving controller will
read buttons 1 and 2 to get the spinner's position.

When a spinner (or Atari driving controller) spins, the values on its
two output lines cycles through the sequence 11->10->00->01->11->...
in one direction, or 11->01->11->10->00->... in the other direction.
Using successive readings, the software can tell which way the spinner
is spinning. The software can also tell how fast the spinner is
spinning as long as it reads the lines frequently enough to avoid
missing any transitions.

The Atari driving controller has 4 "teeth" on its wheel. As each
tooth passes by the GND connection (once per revolution), it sends 4
transitions (11->10->00->01->11 or the reverse), for a total of 16
transitions/rev. The Vortex Spinner has 72 teeth for a total of 288
transitions/rev.

Regards,
Dave

[Dave McCooey]

There is a typo in the second sequence I gave:

typo: 11->01->11->10->00->...
should be: 11->01->00->10->11->...

Regards,
Dave

[Kokovec]

So it acts as a shaft encoder with Gray encoding?
That's cool.
In that case you're right, it would be up to the Vec program to figure
out the resolution.

I have so much to learn :)

[Dave McCooey]

I'm learning too, but that's half the fun. There's a lot of info in
the older posts of this newsgroup, including discussions about
spinners and gray codes.

Regards,
Dave

[Revival Studios]

My new release Colorclash Slim should support the Atari Paddle/Spinner
controller now.

martijn

[Steril707]

Someone care to enlighten me what a "Spinner" is in Vectrex context?

I don't have the slightest idea what you guys are talking about...

thanks,
Michael

[Revival Studios]

Hi Michael,,

A spinner is a controller that uses a rotating disc instead of a
joystick, in most cases a modified atari paddle controller used in
combination with a regular joypad (for the buttons)

[Dave McCooey]

On Oct 6, 2:50 am, Revival Studios <i...@revival-studios.com> wrote:
> My new release Colorclash Slim should support the Atari Paddle/Spinner
> controller now.
>
> martijn

Martijn, could your game be modified to read a higher resolution
spinner,
or maybe have a calibration/configuration sequence at start up?
I suppose the main difficulty might be getting a higher resolution
spinner to test with.

Dave