[Coco] Good games for wico trackball

[Bill Loguidice]

What about Doubleback? It was likely inspired by Atari's arcade machine,
Quantum, which used a trackball, so I wonder how that would work with the
Wico?

-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 Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 1:07 AM, Richard Goedeken <
Richard at fascinationsoftware.com> wrote:

> 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
>
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