Question for developers working with spinners

[AnalogKid]

It could be that I have a wonky roller controller but I was wondering if any other game developers have seen the same thing that I have.  I added an interrupt handler for the IRQ that calls the BIOS UPDATE_SPINNER subroutine and what I'm seeing is occasionally there is "noise" in the values stored for the accumulated spinner velocities.  By that I mean I see a range of absolute values between 0 and 20, with 20 occurring when I spin the ball like a madman, and while maintaining a relatively constant value there will occasionally be a single very high value in the mix, like between 40 and 60.  Also this is occurring with testing code that has a bare minimum of code to avoid impacting the accumulated values.  Obviously I can code expecting noise but I was curious if anyone else had observed this with their own hardware.  

[AnalogKid]

In case any other developers ran into the same problem, it turns out that if you're using the roller controller with the Collectorvision Phoenix there's apparently a problem due to the fact that your using a separate power supply for the roller controller and there's no common ground between the two devices.  As I did, you can code for the issue, i.e. look for a huge jump between the last spinner value and the current, but there is a hardware solution.  Someone created an adapter for the port on the back of the Phoenix that can power the roller controller.

 

  Phoenix Roller Controller power supply

[alekmaul]

So we can't use games with roller controller on Phoenix, correct? 

You are also talking about code, do you have some code snippets to share for this or is it just a test between two values comparison?

I will try to contact the guy from the video to know if he can ship the hardware solution to france.

 

[Tursi]

On 2/18/2024 at 9:31 PM, alekmaul said:

So we can't use games with roller controller on Phoenix, correct? 

You are also talking about code, do you have some code snippets to share for this or is it just a test between two values comparison?

I will try to contact the guy from the video to know if he can ship the hardware solution to france.

 

You can with an external power supply, apparently. I haven't run it myself but others have reported success.

 

I think the spinner interrupt is just a bit noisy. I've done some test apps where I manage it directly and it's still a bit rough. I'd apply smoothing to anything I got from it.

 

[Captain Cozmos]

My personal thoughts would be that in the 21st century make a brand new Roller Controller using a track ball and an arduino.

[AnalogKid]

On 2/18/2024 at 11:31 PM, alekmaul said:

So we can't use games with roller controller on Phoenix, correct? 

You are also talking about code, do you have some code snippets to share for this or is it just a test between two values comparison?

I will try to contact the guy from the video to know if he can ship the hardware solution to france.

 

I bought one of the Phoenix roller controller power supplies and I can confirm that it does clear up the input noise issue.  I mentioned it to my Collectorvision contact.  Who knows, maybe they'll collaborate with the creator.