I recently won my fleabay auction for an arkanoid w/ controller, and was excited to try my new vaus out on my powerpak. No dice. Paddle works with original cart, nothing w/ powerpak. Paddle test rom shows erratic function, but on port 1. Running current powerpak mappers from retrousb and loopy mappers on top of that. Am I missing something? Hoping to get this resolved before my parts come in to make my own paddle. Thanks
Matthew
Hmmm.... Are you using thefox's save state mappers? Their joystick autofire, etc code could be interfering with paddles...
Or else perhaps you're using a JP ROM with a US Vaus? I dunno if the Vaus controller is accessed differently on the NES or Famicom or not.
Perhaps they need open bus or something?
The Atari 2600 paddles jitter to hell when they need cleaned. Clean it ifyou can of course. And yes the JP vaus is accessed differently than the US one. Other than that I don't know about it, I haven't seen much documentation on the JP vaus controller or how to read it.
Jap Roms. Possible. Will check and try to find either an American version, or mebbe research fami vauses. Will let you all know
Okay. What I found out. Roms I've been testing are prolly not u.s. roms. Dont say nintendo of America like my original does. So now I need to make an adapter to go from my expansion port to a nes controller. Best info I collude find is that the fami controller port is essentially the same as the nes expansion port. Guess I could find a us arkanoid rom, but then ark ii is fami only so...
Semi final report on my findings. US arkanoid rom works fine on powerpak with either real vaus, or homemade one w/adc4028. The rest of the roms I tested (arkanoid Japan? ArkanoidII, chase hq). work on powerpak, but you must replicate the famicom x-tra controller port through the nes expansion port (thanks to xious, rahga.com gamemasterquilpue and others for their research and Internet postings). Using that port replication, original fami vaus works. Mapping wires from the fami vaus to the Nes vaus, Nes and homemade vaus work, but must be adjusted to reach full left.
Couple notes: I added an adjustment pot to the homemade vaus shcemqtic as found on the Internet. Original puts out 00-FF.
The fami vaus has no adjustment pot. There are also a couple resistor changes, notably in the button circuit. If one wanted to buy one and use it on a nes in port 2 by changing the cord, they would at least need to add an adjustment pot and possibly a resistor. There would be room on the board. Placement of the pot could be the same as on the nes model, and the added resistor can be simply soldered on the back of the board.
If you own a Vaus and want to disassemble, just pull the black knob off. It is simply pressed on. The rest is self explanatory.
What's the output range out of the box? Is it 62-F2 like emus do?
The one I made can be adjusted to go to 60-F4, which works great for the us rom. The imports I have to adjust down to around 44h for full range of motion. These numbers come from the paddle test rom. I would imagine that all of this could have been done also through software mods, but I'm not all that familiar.
So more than likely is the right range of motion. And my test ROM's display the value in text on the screen is the raw value, so it should be about that. Weird on the import games, but eh.
Hi, guys. I'm a little late, but I have made that homebrew Arkanoid controller and was in touch with Gamemasterquilpue for some time. Nice guy, by the way! He explained me that both Arkanoid US and Arkanoid JP uses different ports to access data:
US:
Player 2 D3 - trigger/start
Player 2 D4 - move
JP:
Player 1 D1 (present on the famicom exp port) - trigger/start
Player 2 D1 (present on the famicom exp port) - move
I was having a hard time trying to figure out why my design wasn't working... sorry if this is redundant/obvious information.
sea hag wrote:
Couple notes: I added an adjustment pot to the homemade vaus shcemqtic as found on the Internet. Original puts out 00-FF.
Oh, that's interesting. Care to explain how you did it?
Hmm, can't find my documentation, but opening up my paddle, it looks like I added the pot on the center wire of the variable resistor. The secret lies in the AD converter, Read up on resistors and voltage for series and parallel circuits. There are also some good googleable articles on how to change teh range of a pot to suit your needs. If you want to feed the AD 3.5 to 5v, then you need the resistance to be in a certain range. So we need to add a resistor in series or parallel, depending on what we need to accomplish. When I made mine up, I had the whole thing on a breadboard, so tweaking a resistance on the pot was easy. I added resistors here and there and watched the output on the test program. If this doesn't help, I can spend some time and schematic my paddle. Lemme know.
Matthew
Did you test the REAL range of the paddle? I have a program just for it if you want it. I really really really need to know.
sea hag wrote:
Hmm, can't find my documentation, but opening up my paddle, it looks like I added the pot on the center wire of the variable resistor. The secret lies in the AD converter, Read up on resistors and voltage for series and parallel circuits. There are also some good googleable articles on how to change teh range of a pot to suit your needs. If you want to feed the AD 3.5 to 5v, then you need the resistance to be in a certain range. So we need to add a resistor in series or parallel, depending on what we need to accomplish. When I made mine up, I had the whole thing on a breadboard, so tweaking a resistance on the pot was easy. I added resistors here and there and watched the output on the test program. If this doesn't help, I can spend some time and schematic my paddle. Lemme know.
Matthew
Thanks for your time and explanation!
I googled, but was having trouble figuring out how to search it. I've found some links teaching how to limit the range of a pot, but english is not my natural language. If I understood it correctly, you put a resistor in series with the main pot to avoid the resistance value to reach zero (limiting the left vaus direction) and you put a secondary pot to avoid main pot to reach the maximum value FF (right vaus direction). Is it right?
I thought you had put the trimpot in series with the ground line in the main pot. And what's this "paddle test rom"?
It would be great to have your schematics, if you have the time and desire to do it. But if you could put just the trimpot and resistor values it will helps a lot too.
Make sure you're using this ROM to test your paddle BTW, first one had a
nasty bug in it. And terrible text.
http://3gengames.webs.com/NES/PaddleTes ... leTest.nes
3gengames wrote:
Make sure you're using this ROM to test your paddle BTW, first one had a
nasty bug in it. And terrible text.
http://3gengames.webs.com/NES/PaddleTes ... leTest.nes
Very cool! Thanks!
Problem is I can't use it to test my paddle, since I don't have a Powerpack. Maybe if I hook it on my paralel port just like we do with normal NES controllers...