Who knew playing Warlords would be so hard?

MajorLag · Post by **MajorLag** » Sat Mar 26, 2005 10:06 am

For the past week, a small portion of my time has been dedicated to research for the next EmuCon. For those of you who don't know, the EmuCon is a PC designed to plug inot a TV and allow you to play just about any game from a good selection of classic game consoles. So in my persuit of knowledge, I dropped $12 on a PSX->USB (single) adaptor from radioshack, since my current plan is to use a 4 player PSX->USB adaptor for the EmuCon, I wanted to see how well one of these thigns works. They are sweet, I really wish I had though of this before I built a (shoddy) 2 player SNES->Parallel adaptor for the prototype.

So anyway, after discovering the sweetness of that adaptor, I now had enough buittons to map almost everything usefull for Stella, which is my favorite 2600 emulator that I was unable to use in the prototype for two reasons:
1) there werent enough buttons on an SNES controller to map everything I wanted
2) There was no way to map arbitrary joystick axis to paddle inputs
So I had used MESS. But MESS, as it turns out, kinda sucks. It doesn't automatically select controller type (a big con for the EmuCon, which is built to use a mere 8 keyboard buttons), has pretty poor compatability, and pretty poor sound emulation. But now, since #1 was solved, I resolved to use Stella, even though it couldn't map arbitrary joystick axis to paddle controls.

Now, paddle controls might not be important to a lot of people, I mean, its not like I'm obsessed with being able to play every game for these consoles. It simply isn't possible (for any reasonable price) to do so at this time (mostly thanks to the lack of TV PC lightguns since ACT Labs stopped making them, CURSE YOU ACT LABS!). But most people aren't addicted to Pong and 4 player Warlords. I need paddle controls.

So the quest began to find a way to get paddle controls to work on Stella in the EmuCon. Originally I planned to look through the Stella source, and either add support for mapping paddle controls to analog joystick inputs, or hardcode the functionality I needed. But while browsing the source I noticed something I didn't expect. You see, there is this device that Atari Age sells called "The Stelladaptor" that allows you to interface an actually Atari 2600 controller through USB. I had always assumed that its behavior was somehow special, since 2600 emulators always need to have "native" Stelladator support to work with it. But I was wrong. The thing acts exactly like a 2 axis 2 button joystick. Hmm.... was it possible that any 2 axis 2 button joystick could work, so long as it was named "Stelladaptor"?

I tested my theory by removing my 2 axis 4 button joystick and adding a custom joystick named "Stelladaptor" with 2 axis and 2 buttons, calibrated it, fired up Warlords and... Success! The X-Axis controlled the left paddle, and the Y axis controlled the right padde, and button 1 and button 2 worked for their respective paddles. Ah ha! I thought. This is great! Now I won't have to drop $60 on stelladaptors and have to find authentic paddles, I can just build my own!.... But I needed 2. Therin lies the problem, I only have one gameport, and the joystick utility in windows will not allow you to map 2 joysticks to one gameport.

So I tohught, no big deal right? I can just buy one of those gameport->usb adaptors, I'll need 2 for the emucon anyway since ITX boards don't have one built in. But lo! I discovered (before buying the thing, thankfully) that it doesn't act the same as a regular gameport, it acts as a HID complient "USB Joystick", and names itself as such, and cannot be renamed!

So there it is, I'm back to square one. Which brings me to the pont of this thread: Does anyone have any bright ideas? Failing that, I'll probably just end up paying for the Stelladaptors, does anyone know where I can get 2 authentic paddle controllers (on the cheap)?

vb_master · Post by **vb_master** » Sat Mar 26, 2005 12:30 pm

Buy this, Stelladapter 2600 to USB Interface, and use with Atari 2600 Racing Controllers.

Sorry, I just had the urge to do that

sam · Post by **sam** » Sat Mar 26, 2005 1:28 pm

vb_master wrote:Buy this, Stelladapter 2600 to USB Interface, and use with Atari 2600 Racing Controllers.

Sorry, I just had the urge to do that

vb, remember when that broke the thread?.....

vb_master · Post by **vb_master** » Sat Mar 26, 2005 2:20 pm

Yeah

MajorLag · Post by **MajorLag** » Sat Mar 26, 2005 6:35 pm

vb_master wrote:Buy this, Stelladapter 2600 to USB Interface, and use with Atari 2600 Racing Controllers.

Well yeah, thats what it looks like I'm going to have to do, only instead of the two-player-only-and-only-work-with-2-games driving controlers, I would get the 4-player-and-infinately-more-usefull paddle controlers. Which is why I asked "does anyone know where I can get 2 authentic paddle controllers (on the cheap)?".

I was just hoping that someone else might have a better (read: cheaper) solution.

MajorLag · Post by **MajorLag** » Sat Mar 26, 2005 8:34 pm

Alright! Update and usefull information:

So, disatisfied with the idea of taking the easy (yet pricey) way out, I took one more shot at finding a cheaper way to play paddle games on Stella. I diug through the registry and replaced the name of the PSX to USB adaptor "USB Joystick " to "Stelladaptor" (the registry setting was at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\MediaProperties\PrivateProperties\Joystick\OEM\VID_0E8F&PID_0003 on my system, results may vary). And it worked! I can play the joystick games and the paddle games without mapping anything! Driving games are now unplayable, but there was only one of those anyway (Indy 500, should the trivia ever be required to win you a million dollars on a quiz show). Though, for four player Warlords, I will need to hack 2 playstation analog controlers (since the X and Y axis of one analog stick are the two analog inputs for the paddles of one controler) into psudo paddles. It is even possible that driving games could be playable with the right controler hacks!

Also, all the Atari 2600 system controls had to be moved from the first and second joystick to the keyboard, but fortunatly there will be just enough keys on my hacked up EmuCon "remote" to support all of them.

Though if anybody has any better ideas, I'm still open to suggestions.

vb_master · Post by **vb_master** » Sat Mar 26, 2005 9:04 pm

Actually, you could mod an old ball mouse to be a paddle...

MajorLag · Post by **MajorLag** » Sat Mar 26, 2005 11:19 pm

vb_master wrote:Actually, you could mod an old ball mouse to be a paddle...

But I'd only get 2 axis. No good for Warlords. And worse, Stella doesn't even support using the mouse to control 2 separate paddles at once. So I'd only get one paddle.