> > Armadillo Racing is awesome, don't knock it! > > (Also plenty of people never saw it in an arcade and MAME is their only chance to > > enjoy it.) > > It's a great ice-breaker at parties. > > The trackball IIRC works a lot like the mouse on the original Macintosh; you get a > series of digital left/right/up/down inputs and the speed of those inputs varies by > how fast you roll the ball (and if you roll it too fast you start getting inputs in > the opposite direction). The pedals in Prop Cycle use a similar but much simplified > setup.
I envisioned it as this: picture three spinners on their sides, one pointing straight upwards, and the other two pointing at 45 degree angles to the left and right, respectively. All three spinners rest against the underside of the trackball. This way, the game could calculate the Armadillo's direction and "velocity" by the amount of spin the player gives one spinner over another by virtue of the direction and force applied to the trackball. This could not be possible with a trackball alone, which is more suited for position calculations.
Is this anything close to reality? If so, that's mighty clever - and I assume would require some equally clever reverse engineering to emulate with any degree of accuracy.
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