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star wars control centering
#302515 - 01/13/13 11:15 PM
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Does anyone know why the controls in Star Wars (Atari vector) are not centered on the screen? The crosshair is over to one side.
I know that it's much easier to play it with a mouse, but I was showing it to someone on my MAME cabinet the other day and I noticed that the default controls are off-center.
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Re: star wars control centering
[Re: krick]
#302518 - 01/13/13 11:54 PM
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FWIW I used to own the cab and it started there, off center. I don't know if my controls were screwed and mame has a bug, but it's probably "correct".
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Re: star wars control centering
[Re: krick]
#302520 - 01/14/13 12:24 AM
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> Does anyone know why the controls in Star Wars (Atari vector) are not centered on the
> screen? The crosshair is over to one side.
>
> I know that it's much easier to play it with a mouse, but I was showing it to someone
> on my MAME cabinet the other day and I noticed that the default controls are
> off-center.
Hmmm... always wondered about that. Now read this:
http://www.aaarpinball.com/ASW/ASW.htm
While several Star Wars owners indicated this behavior was normal, I always questioned why this would be the case. I eventually learned this behavior isn't normal! I'm guessing that Star Wars owners that need to calibrate on each power cycle also have a x2212 persistent memory issue.
My Star Wars had an issue with storing persistent settings (the x2212 access). See other parts of this page for information on that issue and the resolution. The key takeaway is that once I fixed the persistent setting issue, my Star Wars (and Empire Strikes Back) did store the calibration. On valid concern that suggested Star Wars might not store this calibration was that the number of writes to the persistent memory is limited. If the game wrote the calibration data each time it changed, that would consume the persistent memory lifespan quickly. However, having spent time looking at the Star Wars schematics I now know that Star Wars writes to the x2212 chip each time the game is powered off. Since the game is going to write to the x2212, it may as well write the calibration data.
So after reading that page, it will auto-calibrate after you move it to all four corners (just tried it and it worked). Power-off, and back on, and it's back to the same spot.
Maybe there's a way for MAME to make the same kind of fix (write the calibration data back to the x2212)?
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Re: star wars control centering
[Re: krick]
#302553 - 01/14/13 07:40 PM
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Probably doesn't have to do with your issue, but upon reading your post, I remembered this little bit of trivia about the centering of the arcade controls (from Atari hardware engineer Jed Margolin's site- http://www.jmargolin.com):
"You might have noticed that the centering of the Star Wars control yoke is funny at times. Star Wars originally used a Pokey to read the pots. At that time, people either made their own A/D converter with a counter, a comparator, and a ramp, or they used Pokey. The Pokey was a full custom IC designed for the Atari 800/400 to read pots and keys, which gave it its name, POts and KEYs. There was some room left over so they put in some crude square wave sound generators as well as a UART. Unfortunately, Pokey does a really awful job of reading pots; it is guaranteed to produce occasional wrong values. The software to deal with it is pretty nasty. After Greg Rivera brought this to my attention I took the daring step of actually putting in a real A/D (Gasp!), the ADC-0809. Unfortunately, many people continued to use the original code to treat the A/D values as though they had come from a Pokey. Like Greg. That is why the Controller in Star Wars keeps getting recentered, usually badly."
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Re: star wars control centering
[Re: Smitdogg]
#303205 - 01/25/13 04:22 AM
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> FWIW I used to own the cab and it started there, off center. I don't know if my
> controls were screwed and mame has a bug, but it's probably "correct".
It works the same way in MAME. (I finally got to try it, and it was so wonderful to have a straight crosshairs.) Not likely it'll get changed, then. But perhaps into MisfitMAME.
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