[Coco] Worst game ever...

[Bill Loguidice]

To split hairs, a paddle is different from a spinner, though the names are
often used interchangeably depending on the circumstance. A spinner has no
stop, meaning it can move freely in either direction for as long as you
want. It's popular on classic arcade machines and home MAME machines. A
paddle on the other hand, in the classic Atari sense, has a finite range of
motion, with a hard stop in either direction. You can literally spin a
spinner and it will keep spinning for a time (the nicer ones for a very
long time), while a paddle is much slower and obviously can't be spun
freely.

For a time I assumed that the Atari 2600's driving controller (used only
with Indy 500 pack-in game and a few modern homebrews, sadly) was just a
spinner with the stops removed. Apparently it works completely differently
(polls differently), even though cosmetically it looks more or less the
same.

Most home paddle controllers mimicked the Atari 2600 design. Commodore
released their own paddles in the early 80s for a time that actually had a
higher sampling rate than the Atari 2600 designs. If you try to play some
of the early Commodore paddle games with a non-Commodore paddle, it's a
very different experience since it's expecting the higher resolution. Most
games though obviously went for the Atari standard.

One of my favorite uses for the Atari 2600 paddles was playing Arkanoid on
the C-64. I beat the game with those, and I don't think I would have
enjoyed the game half as much if I had to use a joystick or mouse, which
were also options. To this day, I'm super biased against any game that
should be using paddles when instead it only supports a joystick, mouse, or
touch.

In any case, I think analog controllers on systems like the CoCo, Apple II,
and Atari 5200 really weren't as prized (and in other systems, like the
Vectrex, not even supported in many of its games) because most games and
game types of the day were designed specifically around digital controls.
Analog controls really only came into their own once 3D gaming took hold,
and then arguably in a better form than we got with the earliest
implementations of analog joysticks that often didn't self center and/or
erred on the looser side.

-Bill

===================================================
Bill Loguidice, Managing Director; Armchair Arcade, Inc.
<http://www.armchairarcade.com>
===================================================
Authored Books
<http://www.amazon.com/Bill-Loguidice/e/B001U7W3YS/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_1> and
Film <http://www.armchairarcade.com/film>; About me and other ways to get
in touch <http://about.me/billloguidice>
===================================================

On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 11:24 AM, Allen Huffman <alsplace at pobox.com> wrote:

> On Jan 23, 2015, at 9:41 AM, Bill Loguidice <bill at armchairarcade.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > Pooyan is one of my favorite arcade games, and a favorite home port on a
> > variety of systems. My only major disappointment with the CoCo version
> (the
> > platform's relative graphic and sound capabilities aside) is that it
> runs a
> > bit slow.
>
> Pooyan was also one of the games I played a ton of on the CoCo. I never
> saw the arcade version until much later via MAME.
>
> > The Atari 8-bit version of "Clowns & Balloons" benefited from paddle
> > support. It's a shame that the CoCo never had paddle controllers as far
> as
> > I know (I'm not about small runs of them). I would imagine with the
> > joysticks being analog that it wouldn't have been that difficult to
> create
> > relatively speaking.
>
> Games like Centipede and Pong made great use of the CoCos analog
> controllers. I just remember how we "all" seemed to hate analog back then
> and just wanted an Atari stick. Amusing since today analog is back on every
> game console.
>
> The paddle seems to have fallen out of use... I was surprised to find them
> referred to as "spinners" these days. I think our terms were just fine.
>
> The Atari 2600 had two types of paddles... The ones that came with the
> unit stopped at each side, for long games, then they had the driving
> controllers that spun without stops. I believe one of those was a rotary
> encoder... I had always assumed the other was a potentiometer like the
> CoCo's joysticks and were easy to hook up but maybe the ones I read about
> had more circuitry than that.
>
>
>
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