Home Page Forums MAME MAME 8bit Apples - Apple I, II, /// and the 16 bit GS

In my quest to find games that supported the Joyport I came across Mating Zone, which supported the Wico Trackball. It had a trackball controller interface board that would go into one of the apple slots.

Does anyone know of anything else that supported the Wico Trackball?

Here's some pics from ebay:





It's got four 74LS191 4 bit counters so I think it can present itself with an X axis from 0-255 and Y from 0-255. I don't have hardware or a manual so I'm just guessing.



Hitting CTRL+I brings up the configuration screen:
(This game covers everything!)



Hitting the left arrow cycles the < through the options, hitting the right arrow cycles the > through the options.

A number key will set the slot or the button number for the last arrow that was moved.

Here I've got the wico set for slot 4 and button 1.



reading the trackball at 6b1c:



I don't understand why it would need to hit c0c2 c0c4 and c0c6?

The game only concerns itself with a single axis, I would assume that reading c0c1 would be the y axis.

reading the buttons at 6a40:
(read C0C6: bit 7 is button 1, bit 6 is button 2)



If I put watchpoints at c0c0,f,r,1 and then set the A register with a=c0;g and then use the keypad enter key (so it doesn't clear the command line) I can feed it some values.



It seems that the game only uses the upper 6 bits of the value returned, if I feed it a sequence of values like b0,b4,b8,bc,c0 we can see the character move to the right, feeding it descending values moves to the left.

I didn't know the Wico trackball existed. Should be easy enough to hook up. That code indicates they won't accept values > 0xdc, and that's obviously to keep the character out of the score area on the right.

Apple paddle support too!

I have one of these trackballs and have used it with my Apple ///. It took a bit to find the disk with the A3 Driver on it. It has quiet good integration with the console and simulates cursor key movement with the trackball. You can grab the driver from here if you are interested:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/c1dnzw3t97t8n3r/TRKBALL.DSK?dl=0

There is some nice info here on how to program for it:
http://www.txbobsc.com/aal/1983/aal8306.html

Thanks Rob, that second article fills in a lot of important information that we would've had trouble reverse-engineering. Turns out to be quite a versatile interface.

No problems, I was looking on here as i bumped into something and can't quite seem to work out whats going on.

I am playing with an Apple III driver that interfaces with the Prodos block mode card interface, i'm using the cffa2 card that Mame has for testing. It seems the card expansion rom for c800-cfff is being switched off for some reason.
If i run in debug mode, and set a breakpoint for the card entry point, then when it jumps to the expansion rom its just showing c800-cfff all containing ff. If i take a trace of the cpu, it seems to get further before it switches out. The disk boots ok on real HW with that combo. Any thoughts?

I can provide a link to my disk image if that helps. I'm using a recent Mame version.

Ahh, seems like this is due to my harddisk image not being correct for this.

The hd image is different between using an A3 driver with the CFFA2 card and Apple2 Prodos using the CFFA2 card. The Apple3 one has partition info in the first block which seems to confuse the prodos block mode. When I make up a nice new hd image of two 32mb disks it at least boots ok now :-)

Thanks, robj! That wico trackball information is really good!


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Here's something interesting I saw on ebay: A digital atari joystick interface from West side electronics, the DJI-100. According to the seller,


https://www.ebay.com/itm/West-Side-...ck-Interface-Card-Blank-PCB/193015994623








I wonder if the J.Mazur listed on the schematic is Jeff Mazur who made the cdrive.

https://apple2history.org/spotlight/mazur/

That's interesting. Remember that SOS actually only allows 16 MB on a partition - it uses a signed int16 where ProDOS uses unsigned.

From an auction on ebay for the manual for Super Taxman 2 there's a description of the Gizmo and an order form ($15 back in 1982. pretty reasonable)

I'm playing with a SOS driver that hooks with a cards Prodos Block driver, so then the card needs to be configured as it would for an A2. It needs some work still as it sometime bumps into the character loading. I have to be careful of that 16mb limit, seems sos is ok with it, but the system utils and some of the programs are not. CFFA2 has the fixed 32mb sizes, so its not ideal, but we don't have many other choices in MAME.

It still seems a but odd with the rom select when running the -debug option. I'm not sure whats going on there. I have temporarily commented out the cfff disable to help me debug my code.