Stupid fun with the Joystick Calibration value:

I was reading the apple2.cpp source and noticed that the calibration for the x and y axes is different.
The x has 12 msec and the y has 13 msec.

/src/mame/drivers/apple2.cpp:316: m_x_calibration = attotime::from_usec(12).as_double();
/src/mame/drivers/apple2.cpp:317: m_y_calibration = attotime::from_usec(13).as_double();




According to the Apple II reference manual, 3060 ms is how long it should take to read the joystick which sounds right: 12ms * 256 = 3072 ms.

If you divide 3060 ms/256 you get 11.953 ms.


My calibration "program" is just a little applesoft one-liner:

100 PRINT PDL(0),PDL(1): GOTO 100

This would report 142 at rest for the PDL(0) and 154 at rest for PDL(1).




What if I set both to 12 msec? Then I got 142 at rest for both axes.

I got to thinking, what's the minimum values that would give the "full range" and 128 at rest.


It appears to be around 10800 nsec (or 10.8 msec)

// precalculate joystick time constants
m_x_calibration = attotime::from_nsec(10800).as_double();
m_y_calibration = attotime::from_nsec(10700).as_double();




With 10800 nsec, I can get 0 to 255. With 10700 nsec, the range reported is from 0 to 253.

A value too small won't give you a wide enough range.


Just for fun, I thought I'd see how Stellar 7 plays under the IIgs, but I noticed that it doesn't read the joystick properly with the faster CPU speed. Stellar 7 doesn't have any kind of pre-game joystick calibration.

So if I set the calibration down to 6 msec in the IIGS driver, the joystick reads properly and it's playable at the faster IIgs speed. Now Stellar 7 is a fast action game! Whee!

Interestingly, Stellar 7 loads very slowly (or it feels very slow to load) under the IIgs. I wonder why? I thought it'd be faster all around or at least the same speed.

Thanks a lot Osso,
for the moment, I solved creating 2 different launching script (I'm using SDLMAME):
one that contains: ./mame64 -nouse_bezels
an another with: ./mame64 -use_bezels

so I can use the fist one when I'm on the laptop, and the second one when the external display is connected.
This could be a good solution (it works over all the games, so it's perfect),
but I still think adding the feature to toggle between the artwork options, like you can do with slider controls, could be a good improvement.

You can do this at the moment with multiple windows. If you use e.g. "-numscreens 3 -window" you'll get three windows and you can choose a different view for each one, like main system in one window, and device views in the others. Automatically tiling views for multiple devices in a single window is somewhat complicated but doable. Referencing device views is the path to dependency hell and weird interactions.

Can you give a example of a slot device that does that, that I can study?

What I really would like is to define a slot device layout and then include that in a main layout view but that is not possible right?

Given that it is not, I then need to access the main layout and set the state of some bezels with a naming agreed upon
between all possible slot devices, not colliding with each other or anything else in that layout. Also, it would not be possible to have
more then one instance of a particular device. Or maybe I am missing something here.

I run MAME on a laptop with a big external display connected so I have all the screen space to play with the artwork activated.
But when I'm out of home and I play using the internal lid I had to turn off artwork because they are reducing too much the game area.
As MAME remember the last setting per ROM, I had to open menu, going to "Video Options" and change it every time.

Could you tell me if there's a way (or a shortcut) to toggle between the available video modes or to turn on/off artwork without opening menu?

Oh god, I was just thinking recently about how possible this could be with emulation. Our artwork engine may just have enough basics to pull it off too!

Get me that sweet, sweet Radio Shack 500-in-1 Electronics Kit emulation!

They're PC-X only, for hardware reasons.

Thanks, are they PC-X only, or compatible with PC-D too?

Please credit Stefan Stapelberg for the SINIX disks.

Wow, that's fantastic! Thanks rfka

And yeah, would be a great showcase for MAME.

Quite correct - it's windows only.

Customize UI would need enhancement to get what you're after.

If you're good with coding you could make a PR in github; if not, you could make an enhancement request in Mametesters, but I don't know when (or if) it would be actioned.