Re: which encoder wheel?

At 01:33 PM 8/5/97 -0800, you wrote:
>>One thing I've forgotten to ask in all of this is WHICH
>>encoder wheel would be used for the input device? I would
>>guess the Tempest wheel is the most common and, like
>>the Sega wheel, it has a nice heavy flywheel attached.
>>
>>I have seen (and picked up) some HP encoder assemblies
>>that are the size of a panel pot and have quadrature
>>outputs. These don't have flywheels, but would be handy
>>for a bench setup, or for putting into a little box for
>>bench use.
>
>Good point. I haven't counted up all the teeth on the various wheels out
>there, but the one I'm using for testing is one of the Clarostat Optical
>Encoder assemblies with 128 pulses per revolution. (I think that's
>probably quite high compared to Tempest and certainly higher than the Sega
>stuff.) It's easy (relatively speaking) to scale the number of pulses
>down, but it's a pain to make more "virtual" pulses out of what you get in.
>(You need to trigger on rising and falling edges in that case and it's not
>something I want to figure out... ;-)
>
>A lot of Atari stuff seems to use a 64 position encoder assembly. Sega
>stuff looks clost to that amount as well. Kick was something really
>coarse-- maybe 16 or 32 teeth? I don't know about the Atari whirly-gig's
>(like Blasteroids) I think they're close to the spinner on Tempest. Major
>Havoc I'm not sure about for the "real" controller-- I have a (the?)
>prototype Major Havoc roller controller that I can count out I suppose.
>
>IMHO, the Tempest spinner is the best of the lot...

I've counted those wholes in Tempest and Sega to compare the two. Sega had
a nice even 64 which is cool because in quadrature it gives you 256
positions per revolution, which is easy to write code for. Atari's wasn't
64 but some bizarre number like 72 or something, I just remember it being off.

I personally also like the feel of the Tempest spinner best. When I first
spun Sega I thought "Cool, nice and weighted" but when heavily into game
play try giving the Sega control a good spin, then stop it real fast. Yikes!
Spin knob burn!

I don't think the Sega games need the high spins to play and the weight
feels cool there, but Tempest needs some good high speed spins with fast
stops - so for universal I'd go with Atari -- IMHO.

I haven't counted the pulses in Boxing Bugs and Cosmic Chasm, but I have
taken apart the controllers and the resolutions quite high, more like your
Clarostat, it looks like somewhere between 100 and 200 pulses per rev. (It
might actually be the same part, it's some off the shelve shaft encoder, it
wasn't made by Cinematronics.)

-Zonn
Received on Tue Aug 5 14:20:49 1997