[Coco] Worst game ever...

[Allen Huffman]

> On Jan 23, 2015, at 10:41 AM, Bill Loguidice <bill at armchairarcade.com> wrote:
> 
> 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.

Indeed. Back in the day, it was called a "paddle controller" or a "driving controller." I had never seen the term "spinner" until I started trying to find a paddle controller to see about building a control panel to emulate the TRON arcade game :)  I guess after the Atari, no one really used them in home systems so the term never came up until modern MAME days?

> 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.

That is what I had assumed until just last year when I started researching rotary encoders for a project and found references to the Atari stuff.

> 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.

Interesting. That makes sense, since the arcade machines were also different. MAME has a configuration file that adjusts for the differences between the mouse and what the arcade game expects.

> 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.

I moved away from Commodore after the VIC-20 (the C64 was like $600 and I just couldn't afford that). I never had anything for the VIC that used paddles -- it never even occurred to me that paddles worked, though I did use Atari joysticks on it. I wish I had known. Two of the games I wrote for the VIC were "catch the falling object" games like Activision's Kaboom.

> 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.

Nostalgia must be affecting me. Back then, I wanted nothing more than to use an Atari joystick on my CoCo. Today, I want to use a real joystick when playing an emulation. Likewise, I'm having so much fun with BASIC but during the days of active use, I wanted nothing to do with it once I moved in to a real operating system.

I hope to have my CoCo joystick boxes available by the Fest. If it works out, they will go "both ways" and let us use real CoCo joysticks on a PC/Mac for emulators, or use a modern PC joystick on the CoCo. I still wish the CoCo I/O project Bjork proposed would have come to be. It would have been a box with the CoCo I/O ports that plug up to high speed USB so you could use CoCo hardware with an emulator, and even plug up cartridges. (I think it was planned to suck up the ROM code, but would have allowed some kind of interaction with things like RS232 packs, SCSI interfaces, etc.).

Such fun times!

		-- A