Re: Identify This Trakball

On Thu, 16 Dec 1999, fishd wrote:
> At 02:57 PM 12/16/99 -0500, Doug wrote:
> >
> >A while back I reported on my difficulties with an opto on a
> >trakball that I was using with my Quantum motherboard.
>
> The trackball PCB in question is from a Bally/Sente game.
> These came off a Street Football control panel. Each TB
> has a Sente intfc PCB P/N 006-8004-10-0A but without schematics
> I can't what the do exactly.

Cool - a little digging around reveals that Street Football was
one of the Bally/Sente kit games, and that brought up a post on
Dejanews:

http://x42.deja.com/=dnc/[ST_rn=ps]/getdoc.xp?AN=378041967

It appears that there were at least two versions of this sensor
PC - mine (A080-91879-AE75), probably the "Trackball Sensor PC S.R."
or "Sr" version, and the "Jr" version mentioned in the USENET post
in Night Stocker - 'Rotation Sensor PC JR.' on one edge, and the other
has the numbers 'A080-91829-AAB96'
 
Whether this is good (in that the opto sensor board from any of these
series of games will work) or bad (in that I now have three companies'
worth of manuals to sort through to find a replacement) is something I
hope to figure out later tonight.

Meanwhile, I'm thinking back to the "Atari trakball idea" again; now that
I know I'm not using an Atari part, I'll compare the spacings of the gaps
in the encoder wheels with those of the Midi ball (umm, and ball/roller
diameter) to see if they're "close enough".

If they're mechanically close to each other (as they appear to be at first
glance), the easy way to fix this problem is to cut the traces on the
Bally/Sente board, drill a few new holes in the PCB, hot-glue the sensor
from the Atari trakball in place, and wire-wrap new "traces" to the pins.

ObVector: "I shoulda cut the hole in the control panel to fit an Atari
midi trakball, and just thrown the orange translucent ball into the midi
unit! If it didn't fit, I'd know it wasn't original, and if it did fit,
I'd know my final setup would have been an exact match for the original
guts used in Quantum, which is a vector game..."

Later,
Doug.

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