[Coco] Good games for wico trackball

[Richard Goedeken]

Last night I tested the trackball with a bunch of different games.  It works
as Torsten described: a controller in the box processes the movement signals
and presents a voltage to the coco which is proportional to the "position" of
the ball.  When you power it up, it's close to the middle of the range (31).

This is actually unfortunate, because I think it would be nicer if it gave a
voltage proportional to the velocity of the ball instead.  Hitting a 'wall' on
a trackball is lame.  Giving a velocity output would work well for Marble Maze
and any game that was specifically written to work with a true trackball.  It
wouldn't work for games like polaris or arkanoid or colorpede which were
written to work with a joystick, but you can actually play those games better
on a joystick anyway, with it's ability for quick movement.

As it is, the trackball did play pretty well on Colorpede, Kingpede, and Polaris.

Richard

On 03/30/2014 03:12 PM, Torsten Dittel wrote:
> I have one of these (WICO part #72-4550) and can confirm it *behaves* like
> an analog trackball. Of course it is not using potentiometers (like the
> analog CoCo mice) nor does it work like a digital joystick (with 9 discrete
> directional states), but rather more like a (digital) opto-mechanical mouse
> (with two incremental rotary encoders for x and y direction). However, the 4
> resulting digital signals are not fed directly into the CoCo, but rather
> processed by a WICO custom chip (Motorola SC87152P, I guess it is based on
> the MC6805) which will calculate a 64x64 coordinate pair out of the
> movement, which is then output via two DACs (discrete R/2R network) as the
> corresponding voltage for each x and y direction.
> 
> Some more details can be found in this patent (USP#4493992 by David A.
> Geller/WICO): http://www.google.com/patents/US4493992
> 
> Regards,
> Torsten