Digital Joysticks provide better control than Analog Joysticks

[atariksi]

Which joystick do you prefer when playing games?

 

The above quote uses the word "prefer". To me the response calls for an opinion (based on experience and other factors, of course).

 

Trivia question: What post number is this from, and who does the quote belong to?

 

Have fun! Sorry, no prizes.

 

That's pretty good progress given that was one of the posts you missed earlier. Oh, that's part of what's written and I don't see the problem as long as you don't selectively quote one word. And it's "based on experience of both" and you are allowed to vote however you want.

That post I've read several times.

It's a complete sentence that's quoted. The first sentence from the post.

Now I've given enough hints.

Feel free to respond, listing your favourite posts that I may have missed... ones with useful information, of course.

 

A sentence doesn't form the context either just a single word "prefer" doesn't. Here's a sentence you missed or didn't take into account:

 

Leaving out subjectivity like "I like the looks of the analog one", "I'm more used to the analog one", or "That one looks like my neighbor or reminds me of old times" please select in an objective manner according to your own experience with both.

 

And previously we had a debate over paddles which is also mentioned in the same post.

Those examples of subjectivity just point out that your preference should be based on practical experience, as opposed to how it makes you feel... knowing that it looks like your neighbour. The examples don't negate the first sentence, they just qualify it. If they did negate the first sentence, then this whole thread is in vain (wait, did I really write that. ).

 

You can vote however you want but voting with experience is better than voting with just speculation or "going with the flow" which is more of blind following.

[bmcnett]

Connect analog joystick to Atari 800 with pin 5 to potY and pin 9 to potX and +5V to POT GND and fire button to pin 3 with GND at pin 8:

 

10 ?PADDLE(0),PADDLE(1),PTRIG(0)

20 GOTO 10

 

Now for digital joystick do:

 

10 ? STICK(0),STRIG(0)

20 GOTO 10

 

Now close your eyes and take joystick to one of the 9 states and guess the values and then see if they are true. The 9 states are the 8 directions and center. You just have to take your analog joystick to the thresholds where the states change. Now you know what I'm talking about in terms of control.

 

You are right, of course. An analog joystick is not the best digital joystick. After all, you are judging both sticks by their respective ability to express one of "9 states" which is the very definition of a digital joystick. If we were to judge them by their ability to express one of "10 states" the analog joystick would win.

 

Are you really claiming that you got that $500 video capture board twenty years ago without deceiving the representative from the company? I remember how proud you were to have pulled it off - to have not paid cash like a sucker (like me) would have. Far as I know, this kind of denial is a first for you.

Edited December 9, 2010 by bmcnett

[bmcnett]

You can stop the troll baiting. That's strike two for you. One more and you'll be on ignore. I never scammed anyone. I always have followed laws of morality. You have me mixed up with someone else or are now making things up to try to make yourself look good. I DO NOT know you for 20 years like you claim. I only met you in college and maybe once after college. You tried to shut-down my multimedia streaming project in college by sending broadcast messages to the same Network ID that I was using is all I remember of you.

 

Yeah, I have to admit that was a dick move on my part. You deserve an apology. I apologize.

 

Apparently unlike you, I'm cursed with a permanent memory of the dick moves I've made in my life. I think I'm the strange one in this case - most everyone else I know has a more selective memory that erases the bad stuff over time. I don't have a photographic memory or anything, but I can play a lot of memories back like videotapes, and I've been told not everyone can.

 

My motivation for jamming your Krishna Channel was not jealousy, as you assume. At the time, I felt that you had stolen my idea of a broadcast channel - and then gave credit to Lord Krishna for the idea! I was angry because I thought I'd been ripped off. With twenty years' hindsight, it's a silly story that reminds me how foolish young people are

Edited December 9, 2010 by bmcnett

[kool kitty89]

...someone claimed you can mimic a digital joystick with an analog one.

 

In fact, any digital joystick - let's say the original Atari 2600 joystick - could be replaced (at great cost!) by an analog joystick that looks the same, has exactly the same hand feel, and which outputs the same digital signal (after filtering.) It would be impossible to determine whether the stick is analog or digital, without opening it up to examine its guts.

I'ave already brought this up several times: a 4-point (8 way) joystick is NOT the same thing as a digital joystick (could be analog or digital) and likewise a wide range 2 axis controller could be either analog or digital using a variety of mechanisms (resistance, optical, rotary switch, etc). All analog controlls are converted to digital signals and it makes no difference (practically) if it's done inside the controller or inside the console (as most old consoles and computers so -the Jaguar was the last to have that feature iirc), though if the ADC is done inside the controller, 3rd party designers could use other other analog or digital mechanisms and still be compatible as the deciding factor is the encoded output. (if it's serial data -as all modern controllers use- you have to encode it for both digital and analog signals polled internally) That's exactly the case with the N64: Nintendo used a digital mechanism for the thumbstick while 3rd parties used conventional potentiometor modules but both encoded that data (along with the digital button inputs) to a 1-bit serial data stream before sending it to the console.

 

I wouldn't say making an analog joystick for the VCS would be at "great cost" in modern terms other than the general cost/labor tied to a one off homebrew job in general, and that's asuming you're doing internal DAC=>ADC as you suggest, and not using the pot lines directly. In the latter case, it's really cheap and just needed a couple resistors and a few wires effectively construting a basic DAC for the 4 switches to be converted to 8 states (plus neutral) on 2 analog axes. That's exactly how you have "digital" (8 way) joysticks for the 5200 or vectrex using the normal pot lines. (also what early PC "digial" joysticks and gamepads did for simple 8-way control -by the mid 90s you had a lot of other hacks appearing using actual parallel/serial data streams through the 4 button lines on the gameport read by custom drivers in software)

 

However, it is important to note that using such resistor DACs still do have potential issues compared to pure switches. (some problems with error or drift or calibration, but if games were programmed with such analog controllers in mind -or reasonably well programmed for pot based controllers- it shouldn't be a problem at all as the error/drift would be well within acceptable ranges in the most extreme cases -and calibration would be done automatically or via a promt to the user -the latter normally used in DOS stuff)

 

The other issue is polling speed, but that's not cosistent in favoring analog or digital and 60 Hz averaging is all that's needed for most games. (as it is the fast pot scan mode of the A8 is substantially faster than the Atari ST's joystick/mouse polling -not sure how the NES would compare, but it's the only other example from that time to commonly use serial I/O rather than mapped parallel I/O for controllers)

 

 

By this same means, many modern video game systems have analog push buttons, which in most games are interpreted as digital buttons. There is no way for the game player to know that the buttons are not digital, as long as they play digital-only games and do not Google posts like this!

WTF???

Analog buttons? The 7800 used analog buttons, but not many others. Not even all modern controller use analog triggers or thumbsticks necessarily (they're all variable, but not necessarily analog internally: the N64, Saturn3D, and Xterminator used all digital high precision thumbsticks -optical or magnetic in nature- while the Saturn and Xterminator also used digital -magnetic- based triggers for precision variable control). I'm not sure if the DC used real analog or not, but it's still more common to use analog (resistince pot based) internally than the pure digital mechanisms AFIK. (but it doesn't matter to the console/programmer, only the developer of the controller itself)

 

Regardless of the variable sections, all current modern controllers (and the older examples above) use digital (switch based) buttons, d-pad, etc as well as any high precision (analog or digital) stuff, and all of that analog and parallel digital stuff is combined and encoded in a singal serial data stream for the final output regardless of the internal workings of the controller.

 

The PS2's dualshock 2 actually used pressure sensitive buttons (so precision/variable control) for the face buttons, triggers, and the Dualshock3 added pressure sensitive dpad, but those aren't necessarily analog based and may a direct digital mechanism. (the range of motion is too narrow to allow practical use of any pot based stuff at the very least) Though I'm not sure how capacitive (or resistive) touch/pressure based control would be categorized in general. (I think they'd both categorize as analog, and if that sort of pressure based mechanism was used in the DS2, then it would techniucally have analog buttons) A Piezoelectric mechanism may have been used for such, but I'm not positive. (technically that would actually qualify as analog thouch as you're using voltages then converted to digital values)

 

That pressure sensitivity (extremely short throw or none at all but with high precision variable control) has also been used for pretty much all fly by wire high-performance fighter aircraft since the late 70s (the F-16 was the first to use it iirc), that's due to the fact that quick and very fine movements must be possible under high g-forces when the pilot may not have much range of motion. (early examples actually used zero throw, but pilots complaied about the lack of "feel" so later revisions added a tiny amount of give -probably less than that of the average digital 8-way joystick) Again, that mechanism could be acheived by analog to digital, or direct digital means. (not sure what the real world usage of either is, but I'd imagine early examples were limited predominantly to analog to digital mechanisms)

Edited December 9, 2010 by kool kitty89

[bmcnett]

WTF???

Analog buttons?

 

Here there's a simple confusion of terminology. I work on the software side of game development, and because the buttons aren't on/off - because they deliver a value in a range from 0 to N - we think of them as "analog buttons" even if there isn't any analog hardware, because the value we get in software is the same as if the hardware were analog. I do remember also seeing the term "pressure-sensitive buttons" which is what you've been calling these buttons.

 

I wouldn't say making an analog joystick for the VCS would be at "great cost"...

 

As a software guy, any hardware project seems intractably expensive to me! The great cost I referred to was the cost of getting exactly the same hand feel as the original controller, because the goal is to fool experts into thinking one's analog controller is a very familiar digital controller.

Edited December 9, 2010 by bmcnett

[+Stephen]

What got a laugh was your thought experiment or better stated as speculation-- mental regurgitation of pure drivel would be an underestimation. You are free to express your opinion but as I said it means ZERO to me in face of the facts presented in this thread. I already gave the BASIC experiment which is easily performed to determine which joystick allows you to know the states a priori and digital joystick wins hands down. You can't look at games after the fact. You have to have games that are designed for both or use a joystick simulator to allow use of both types of joysticks for the games if doable and then it's controlled. Here's the BASIC experiment and try it yourself since you are too lazy to read up on the thread:

 

Connect analog joystick to Atari 800 with pin 5 to potY and pin 9 to potX and +5V to POT GND and fire button to pin 3 with GND at pin 8:

 

10 ?PADDLE(0),PADDLE(1),PTRIG(0)

20 GOTO 10

 

Now for digital joystick do:

 

10 ? STICK(0),STRIG(0)

20 GOTO 10

 

Now close your eyes and take joystick to one of the 9 states and guess the values and then see if they are true. The 9 states are the 8 directions and center. You just have to take your analog joystick to the thresholds where the states change. Now you know what I'm talking about in terms of control.

So let me get this straight. You post a piece of code which is purely biased to how a digital stick works because by design you ignore any in between states. You know the result you want before you run the experiment, so you design the experiment to support that result. That is OK because it supports your point of view (which of course is the only one in the universe that you feel holds any weight).

 

bmcnett asks a question about a game that an analog stick is better suited for and that is mindless drivel?

 

You truly are a piece of work.

[bmcnett]

You truly are a piece of work.

 

Long ago in college, before the Internet exploded, there was a kind of campus network forum called VAXNOTES, and there were two guys I remember who started their own subforums where they tried to derive the nature of the universe from first principles - atariksi and someone we'll call JVC. One was a member of ISKCON and the other was an Objectivist (i.e. Ayn Rand fanboy.) Things proceeded as you might expect - both subforums became instant troll magnets, and I'm not innocent of a little trolling here and there, though ad hominem attacks weren't my MO.

 

What surprises me here - decades later - is to see the same dynamic playing out, with similar actors employing almost the same stances - and phrases - as in the troll wars of yore. I'm literally seeing paragraphs verbatim from all sides. I'm starting to imagine our collective future in nursing homes, hunched over keyboards, arguing about the DIVINE TRUTH of some trivial aspect of consumer product nostalgia, such as the patterns on Dixie cups or colors of Play-Doh. Which is the ONE TRUE Dixie cup pattern from 1975? After a hundred man-years of trolling, sock-puppetry and back-trolling on the subject, no consensus can emerge.

 

Just for the hell of it, a few years ago I Googled JVC and it seems like his new hobby is "research" into Artificial Intelligence using Visual Basic. His "findings" are presented on the web with breathless enthusiasm, as if it were bleeding edge and leading to some kind of "singular" discovery about the nature of the universe. In fact it is just the kind of work you'd expect from someone who dicks around with Visual Basic for a few hours after work. I tried sending him links to peer-reviewed papers in Artificial Intelligence, to show that he's doing stuff that other people were doing in the 1960s, but he seems to have an anti-reality filter that blocks him from understanding such things. Perhaps at some level he knows he's just a schlub like the rest of us, how could I know.

 

So yeah, some people are "a piece of work" and there isn't much we can do about it, despite our best intentions.

[atariksi]

What got a laugh was your thought experiment or better stated as speculation-- mental regurgitation of pure drivel would be an underestimation. You are free to express your opinion but as I said it means ZERO to me in face of the facts presented in this thread. I already gave the BASIC experiment which is easily performed to determine which joystick allows you to know the states a priori and digital joystick wins hands down. You can't look at games after the fact. You have to have games that are designed for both or use a joystick simulator to allow use of both types of joysticks for the games if doable and then it's controlled. Here's the BASIC experiment and try it yourself since you are too lazy to read up on the thread:

 

Connect analog joystick to Atari 800 with pin 5 to potY and pin 9 to potX and +5V to POT GND and fire button to pin 3 with GND at pin 8:

 

10 ?PADDLE(0),PADDLE(1),PTRIG(0)

20 GOTO 10

 

Now for digital joystick do:

 

10 ? STICK(0),STRIG(0)

20 GOTO 10

 

Now close your eyes and take joystick to one of the 9 states and guess the values and then see if they are true. The 9 states are the 8 directions and center. You just have to take your analog joystick to the thresholds where the states change. Now you know what I'm talking about in terms of control.

So let me get this straight. You post a piece of code which is purely biased to how a digital stick works because by design you ignore any in between states. You know the result you want before you run the experiment, so you design the experiment to support that result. That is OK because it supports your point of view (which of course is the only one in the universe that you feel holds any weight).

 

bmcnett asks a question about a game that an analog stick is better suited for and that is mindless drivel?

 

You truly are a piece of work.

 

You didn't get it straight is the entire problem here. The code is not biased. I can ask for more than 9 states but every state of the analog joystick is just as unlikely to get to a priori as any other. In fact, using just 9 states gives you a higher probability for center. In the digital case, there's no probability-- it's direction exact and every state is known a priori. I already proved it mathematically that as you increase number of levels used in an analog joystick, the limit as L->infinity, the control you have with an analog joystick reaches ZERO.

 

Bmcnett wasn't asking a question but mocking the digital joystick control mistakenly. He wasn't giving any example of any game but it was some made-up thought experiment.

 

Read more carefully next time.

[atariksi]

You can stop the troll baiting. That's strike two for you. One more and you'll be on ignore. I never scammed anyone. I always have followed laws of morality. You have me mixed up with someone else or are now making things up to try to make yourself look good. I DO NOT know you for 20 years like you claim. I only met you in college and maybe once after college. You tried to shut-down my multimedia streaming project in college by sending broadcast messages to the same Network ID that I was using is all I remember of you.

 

Yeah, I have to admit that was a dick move on my part. You deserve an apology. I apologize.

 

Apparently unlike you, I'm cursed with a permanent memory of the dick moves I've made in my life. I think I'm the strange one in this case - most everyone else I know has a more selective memory that erases the bad stuff over time. I don't have a photographic memory or anything, but I can play a lot of memories back like videotapes, and I've been told not everyone can.

 

My motivation for jamming your Krishna Channel was not jealousy, as you assume. At the time, I felt that you had stolen my idea of a broadcast channel - and then gave credit to Lord Krishna for the idea! I was angry because I thought I'd been ripped off. With twenty years' hindsight, it's a silly story that reminds me how foolish young people are

 

That's just complete rubbish. Your memory is failing you in both cases-- this one and the Oculus-10 digitizer. I made that channel WAY BEFORE you did. I could accuse you of stealing more than anything else. But I only accused you of something I am sure of-- namely jamming up my broadcasts. It's in one of my college projects in writing when it was released. Oh, even after you came up with yours, it was in no way a TV channel-- simple static images compared to live video.

 

Connect analog joystick to Atari 800 with pin 5 to potY and pin 9 to potX and +5V to POT GND and fire button to pin 3 with GND at pin 8:

 

10 ?PADDLE(0),PADDLE(1),PTRIG(0)

20 GOTO 10

 

Now for digital joystick do:

 

10 ? STICK(0),STRIG(0)

20 GOTO 10

 

Now close your eyes and take joystick to one of the 9 states and guess the values and then see if they are true. The 9 states are the 8 directions and center. You just have to take your analog joystick to the thresholds where the states change. Now you know what I'm talking about in terms of control.

 

You are right, of course. An analog joystick is not the best digital joystick. After all, you are judging both sticks by their respective ability to express one of "9 states" which is the very definition of a digital joystick. If we were to judge them by their ability to express one of "10 states" the analog joystick would win.

You misunderstood. I am claiming what states you know a priori. The more states you want to use on an analog joystick, the worse it gets in terms of control.

 

Are you really claiming that you got that $500 video capture board twenty years ago without deceiving the representative from the company? I remember how proud you were to have pulled it off - to have not paid cash like a sucker (like me) would have. Far as I know, this kind of denial is a first for you.

 

Your memory fails you. I paid $400 for the board instead of $500 because I had my brother order for his company and they gave a corporate discount. That's not a scam, but you jamming someone's broadcasts is violation of all rules of morality.

[bmcnett]

Bmcnett wasn't asking a question but mocking the digital joystick control mistakenly. He wasn't giving any example of any game but it was some made-up thought experiment.

 

Digital joystick control is awesome and I love it. You know what my favorite digital joystick games are? The Super Mario Bros. series for NES. Those games project an interesting illusion of horizontal speed control that feels analog, but isn't. When playing those games, I really feel like my horizontal movement IS Mario and by extension, I am become Mario. Even now that I'm pushing 40 and my beard is gray. Hats off to Miyamoto (its designer.) I bumped into him at the 2004 E3 in Los Angeles. You'd be surprised how short he is in person. I may have learned the Japanese language just to understand him better. His name and the name of his company - 宮本茂 and 任天堂 - are two of the first Japanese phrases I memorized.

 

What is your favorite digital joystick game, and why?

Edited December 10, 2010 by bmcnett

[bmcnett]

That's just complete rubbish. Your memory is failing you in both cases-- this one and the Oculus-10 digitizer. I made that channel WAY BEFORE you did. I could accuse you of stealing more than anything else. But I only accused you of something I am sure of-- namely jamming up my broadcasts. It's in one of my college projects in writing when it was released. Oh, even after you came up with yours, it was in no way a TV channel-- simple static images compared to live video.

 

I have no idea when you conceived of your thing, but I heard of it the same time everyone else did - weeks or months after I'd been broadcasting my thing and talking with you about my thing. Never before today have you ever claimed that the idea of broadcasting was yours first. I'm starting to get the idea that there is a malicious and disingenuous side to you that I haven't seen before. Nice dig about how I didn't own a capture card at the time. Guess I should have had more money, like you did.

 

BUT more importantly! This whole shebang sounds like a silly thing done by foolish kids long ago. I don't bear any ill will toward you. I know today that my anger toward you at the time was wrong, because I'm a little older and wiser. SERIOUS QUESTION: are you wiser today than you were twenty years ago? Is there anything you've ever done that you feel was wrong?

 

Your memory fails you. I paid $400 for the board instead of $500 because I had my brother order for his company and they gave a corporate discount. That's not a scam, but you jamming someone's broadcasts is violation of all rules of morality.

 

Ok Mr. Morality, let's roll. Your brother ordered it for his company, but was it for his company's use? Or did he fib and hand the card off to you once he got it? Is it moral to fib? What's the dividing line between a fib and a lie? I don't think Krishna had much to say about Donkey Kong, but he definitely had a lot to say about this kind of stuff.

 

I'm not sure if I buy your story about the corporate discount yet. I have a pretty clear memory of you bragging to me about how you played the company's representative by claiming you were going to use the card for a purpose that they felt was worth donating a card, and then using it for some other purpose.

Edited December 10, 2010 by bmcnett

[atariksi]

Bmcnett wasn't asking a question but mocking the digital joystick control mistakenly. He wasn't giving any example of any game but it was some made-up thought experiment.

 

Digital joystick control is awesome and I love it. You know what my favorite digital joystick games are? The Super Mario Bros. series for NES. Those games project an interesting illusion of horizontal speed control that feels analog, but isn't. When playing those games, I really feel like my horizontal movement IS Mario and by extension, I am become Mario. Even now that I'm pushing 40 and my beard is gray. Hats off to Miyamoto (its designer.) I bumped into him at the 2004 E3 in Los Angeles. You'd be surprised how short he is in person. I may have learned the Japanese language just to understand him better. His name and the name of his company - 宮本茂 and 任天堂 - are two of the first Japanese phrases I memorized.

 

What is your favorite digital joystick game, and why?

 

Yeah, creativity helps in implementing things like speed via the digital joystick. Some people imagine it's only on/off for digital joystick, but you can easily implement speed and other variable things with a digital joystick.

 

I like pac-man, donkey kong, frogger, hero, and a bunch of others.

[kool kitty89]

WTF???

Analog buttons?

 

Here there's a simple confusion of terminology. I work on the software side of game development, and because the buttons aren't on/off - because they deliver a value in a range from 0 to N - we think of them as "analog buttons" even if there isn't any analog hardware, because the value we get in software is the same as if the hardware were analog. I do remember also seeing the term "pressure-sensitive buttons" which is what you've been calling these buttons.

Yes, but Sony is the only one to do that, so it's not like it's common. The others on;y use thumbsticks and long throw triggers for variable control. (be it analog/pot based ot direct digital mechanisms)

 

And yes, it's all the same to the programmers and the hardware itself. (though programmers would have to take into account real world functionality and any flaws in the specific controllers used -including accuracy/consistency/twitchiness of analog controls -as the case may be- as well as throw distance, etc)

 

And if they did use peizo stuff, it technically would qualify as analog anyway.

 

I wouldn't say making an analog joystick for the VCS would be at "great cost"...

 

As a software guy, any hardware project seems intractably expensive to me! The great cost I referred to was the cost of getting exactly the same hand feel as the original controller, because the goal is to fool experts into thinking one's analog controller is a very familiar digital controller.

In the context of pure analog (no internal ADC/polling -let alone serial encoding hardware -usually an MCU), you could have a rather straightforward hack that made any switch-based digital joystick into an analog joystick using analog switches (more or less) and what effectively ammounts to a crude, low resolution DAC with a few resistors.

In the context of the 8A/5200/VCS, it would make sense to modify a VCS stick to output the 8 directions as 8 different analog states (or rather 2 states -plus neutral- on 2 axes), and there are also schematics for external adapters out there, but it's simpler in many ways to do it internally.

Just a couple resistors, a bit of soldering, and a few added wires (plus an appropriate cable/connector) and you're good to go.

 

Again, there's even hombrew controllers available like the Sega Genesis pad for the Vectrex. (analog d-pad that has the same feel and perceived functionality of a digital d-pad, but is analog -in that case using 4 separate axes given the way the vectrex works, but also only 1 resistor needed)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkDGgOnikHY

 

The old Gravis gamepad uses same mechanism:

http://www.epanorama.net/documents/joystick/pc_circuits.html#ownstick

http://www.epanorama.net/documents/joystick/pc_special.html#gravispad

[svenski]

Ok, if you guys don't stop with this thread then I'm going to write a film about it and one of you is going to be played by Leonardo Di Caprio.

 

Move on guys, agree to disagree or something. Soon the 8-bit board will be like the Jag board.

[potatohead]

@bmcnett: I have that same characteristic. As we age, we get a LOT of perspective. If only there was a do over...

 

Good comment, just thought I would share some resonance on that.

[potatohead]

Unless there are posts outside this thread, it's only one thread right now.

 

(easily skipped)

 

 

 

Re: Basic program and admission of control superiority of analog devices.

 

Atariski said: [the more states you use, the worse analog is for control]

 

Well, a few comments. First, THANK YOU for finally admitting that analog devices can be state defined. In fact, that "a priori" basic program is only a couple of nice comparisons away from working exactly as the digital one does.

 

I know you understand core program ideas Atariski. So then, how come we don't use the computer properly?

 

10 A=PADDLE(0):B=PADDLE(1)
20 ?(A < 82) + ((A > 142)*2)) + ((B < 82)*4) + ((B > 112)*
30 GOTO 10 

 

Seems to me, a user can move the analog thing, knowing the number that's going to result, same as they would the digital device.

 

From there, we are talking about shitty analog joysticks, vs good ones, which has no material difference from shitty digital ones, vs good digital ones.

 

A little bit of math, or a coupla more comparisons easily extends the number of states, while retaining the discrete behavior, inherent in digital only control input means and methods.

 

So then, if one were wanting to control speed, the digital options are limited. Either a direction is input, or not, and if it is input, and stays input, ramp the speed up according to function speed(X), right? Could do steps or some other thing too, no worries there. The key here is that the user is limited to not pressing, pressing and releasing, pressing and hold then release, and some combination of taps and holds, all of those distributing additional state information serially over time, as only one bit of directional information is available.

 

All of those are possible with the analog device, with the addition of PRESS MORE, PRESS A LOT MORE, PRESS A LITTLE, etc...

 

Those states are addressable over far less time, due to there being more direction bits available.

 

Finally, the programmer is completely free to make those modal too, meaning at times absolute positioning could be used, for a tail gunner kind of thing, or zones for binary input, or combinations, depending on the input required to realize the desired interaction dynamics.

 

And that equates to MORE CONTROL options, with the programmer being completely free to do what they will with the various analog states available to them.

Edited December 10, 2010 by potatohead

[atariksi]

That's just complete rubbish. Your memory is failing you in both cases-- this one and the Oculus-10 digitizer. I made that channel WAY BEFORE you did. I could accuse you of stealing more than anything else. But I only accused you of something I am sure of-- namely jamming up my broadcasts. It's in one of my college projects in writing when it was released. Oh, even after you came up with yours, it was in no way a TV channel-- simple static images compared to live video.

 

I have no idea when you conceived of your thing, but I heard of it the same time everyone else did - weeks or months after I'd been broadcasting my thing and talking with you about my thing. Never before today have you ever claimed that the idea of broadcasting was yours first. I'm starting to get the idea that there is a malicious and disingenuous side to you that I haven't seen before. Nice dig about how I didn't own a capture card at the time. Guess I should have had more money, like you did.

Make up whatever you want. Go back to college and check out the written proof. I even did a live guitar concert in my dorm room before you came up with your idea. There are tons of witnesses who knew what you did and when. Only malicious intent was yours. Yeah, I'm wiser today.

 

Your memory fails you. I paid $400 for the board instead of $500 because I had my brother order for his company and they gave a corporate discount. That's not a scam, but you jamming someone's broadcasts is violation of all rules of morality.

 

Ok Mr. Morality, let's roll. Your brother ordered it for his company, but was it for his company's use? Or did he fib and hand the card off to you once he got it? Is it moral to fib? What's the dividing line between a fib and a lie? I don't think Krishna had much to say about Donkey Kong, but he definitely had a lot to say about this kind of stuff...

No fib. He bought it for his company (IBM) and they were working on video conferencing software. He had already told me to do co-op with them since I was also interested in multimedia. They were already buying various boards to see what their software was compatible with-- mostly in the thousands of dollars range. Once again, you are speculating and nor is this stuff even related to the topic.

 

I don't know what you have against Donkey Kong, but it's one of those games that evinces the weaknesses of the analog joysticks in a wide variety of areas as compared to digital joystick control as I described earlier in the thread: (1) multiple barrel jumping (straight, backward, forward), (2) going to ladders and climbing them in a more exact manner, (3) jumping over coal, platform to platform, over oil barrel (in pie screen), (4) jumping from to escalators, etc.

[NorthPole(heeHAW)]

That's just complete rubbish. Your memory is failing you in both cases-- this one and the Oculus-10 digitizer. I made that channel WAY BEFORE you did. I could accuse you of stealing more than anything else. But I only accused you of something I am sure of-- namely jamming up my broadcasts. It's in one of my college projects in writing when it was released. Oh, even after you came up with yours, it was in no way a TV channel-- simple static images compared to live video.

 

I have no idea when you conceived of your thing, but I heard of it the same time everyone else did - weeks or months after I'd been broadcasting my thing and talking with you about my thing. Never before today have you ever claimed that the idea of broadcasting was yours first. I'm starting to get the idea that there is a malicious and disingenuous side to you that I haven't seen before. Nice dig about how I didn't own a capture card at the time. Guess I should have had more money, like you did.

Make up whatever you want. Go back to college and check out the written proof. I even did a live guitar concert in my dorm room before you came up with your idea. There are tons of witnesses who knew what you did and when. Only malicious intent was yours. Yeah, I'm wiser today.

 

Your memory fails you. I paid $400 for the board instead of $500 because I had my brother order for his company and they gave a corporate discount. That's not a scam, but you jamming someone's broadcasts is violation of all rules of morality.

 

Ok Mr. Morality, let's roll. Your brother ordered it for his company, but was it for his company's use? Or did he fib and hand the card off to you once he got it? Is it moral to fib? What's the dividing line between a fib and a lie? I don't think Krishna had much to say about Donkey Kong, but he definitely had a lot to say about this kind of stuff...

No fib. He bought it for his company (IBM) and they were working on video conferencing software. He had already told me to do co-op with them since I was also interested in multimedia. They were already buying various boards to see what their software was compatible with-- mostly in the thousands of dollars range. Once again, you are speculating and nor is this stuff even related to the topic.

 

I don't know what you have against Donkey Kong, but it's one of those games that evinces the weaknesses of the analog joysticks in a wide variety of areas as compared to digital joystick control as I described earlier in the thread: (1) multiple barrel jumping (straight, backward, forward), (2) going to ladders and climbing them in a more exact manner, (3) jumping over coal, platform to platform, over oil barrel (in pie screen), (4) jumping from to escalators, etc.

 

I love Monkeys, and I love ANALouge.

 

Can this thread stop now?

Edited December 11, 2010 by NorthPole(heeHAW)

[Divya16]

 

I love Monkeys, and I love ANALouge.

 

Can this thread stop now?

 

If you noticed, it had stopped for more than 24 hours until you replied. Maybe you don't want it to stop. Yeah, some people like uncertainty, blindly follow the leader, or follow whatever your beloved computer interface is, etc.

[potatohead]

Perhaps it stopped because it's getting really difficult to maintain the illusion that the proposition made to start it is not refuted.

 

And... silence is on the list of things people do in order to avoid acceptance of a point fairly taken. Watch for this topic later, with the claim that it was never properly refuted at this time, silence used to build a case for ambiguity where none really exists.

 

(yes, that is part of why I posted the list)

[bmcnett]

I can say that I've learned something today. I had always thought atariksi was a cool hacker and stood up for him back in the day, when people gossiped about his appearance or beliefs. Seeing him here try to "edit the matrix" to assert moral and technical dominance over me puts an end to all that.

 

It hardly matters, but the college projects we talked about here were both pretty trivial - like 1000 lines of assembly or so. I freely admit that neither was worth fighting over.

[atariksi]

I can say that I've learned something today. I had always thought atariksi was a cool hacker and stood up for him back in the day, when people gossiped about his appearance or beliefs. Seeing him here try to "edit the matrix" to assert moral and technical dominance over me puts an end to all that.

 

It hardly matters, but the college projects we talked about here were both pretty trivial - like 1000 lines of assembly or so. I freely admit that neither was worth fighting over.

 

Project isn't worth fighting over but your false accusation that it's your idea is what I was addressing. I haven't edited anything. I was in college 3 years before you came there (started one year earlier from Hoboken H.S.). The TKC ran for 2+ years and it wasn't developed overnight either. As I said, you can go back to college and check it out yourself (they must have some records of senior projects and such things). I still have the source code to that. Your stuff was 256-color standard VGA w/static imagery. Mine was 320*400*4096 color and gray-scale hacked VGA modes w/moving pictures. Don't know what you did with your audio, but mine only supported Sound-Blaster.

[atariksi]

In the context of pure analog (no internal ADC/polling -let alone serial encoding hardware -usually an MCU), you could have a rather straightforward hack that made any switch-based digital joystick into an analog joystick using analog switches (more or less) and what effectively ammounts to a crude, low resolution DAC with a few resistors.

In the context of the 8A/5200/VCS, it would make sense to modify a VCS stick to output the 8 directions as 8 different analog states (or rather 2 states -plus neutral- on 2 axes), and there are also schematics for external adapters out there, but it's simpler in many ways to do it internally.

Just a couple resistors, a bit of soldering, and a few added wires (plus an appropriate cable/connector) and you're good to go.

Why would anyone want to use slower, inexact, longer throw analog joysticks for machines that already have something better. If you studied the VCS/A800 code, you have the capability to instantly read the joystick at any time anywhere. By going analog, you restrict to reading them during VBLanking (or some frame-based IRQ) and introduce the uncertainties and more complicated code. And the fast pot scan is even more erroneous than the frame-based analog readings. When the digital method exists, there's no reason to degrade to analog. In case of A5200, there's a very good reason to upgrade to digital joystick to get a better defined result for the 9-states although the interface is still analog.

[potatohead]

But that doesn't get you anything control related.

 

Reading anytime is nice, and it's easy, good for I/O projects and such, but it's not really a control issue. There is the frame one is viewing, and the frame to come, and the state of the input between. Lots of reads risk catching a debounce, entering a bug state as well. Better to take that sample, store it, act on it, then repeat with another sample.

 

VBLANK is the perfect time to sample. Heck, I would do it right at the end of the useful raster, maybe right at the start of VSYNC.

 

As for why, it's answered in the post, and with the code above. (yeah, there is a typo in it, I saw it too late)

 

Why is simply when more state inputs are required. Analog devices do that far more easily, and in a shorter period of input time, compared to single bit digital input devices do. (per direction)

 

You know, you can keep ignoring me, but it won't really work.

 

Agreed on some more complex code, but who cares? Once that is written, it's written. Use it over and over, and in assembly, it's a few bytes. No worries.

Edited December 12, 2010 by potatohead

[kool kitty89]

In the context of pure analog (no internal ADC/polling -let alone serial encoding hardware -usually an MCU), you could have a rather straightforward hack that made any switch-based digital joystick into an analog joystick using analog switches (more or less) and what effectively ammounts to a crude, low resolution DAC with a few resistors.

In the context of the 8A/5200/VCS, it would make sense to modify a VCS stick to output the 8 directions as 8 different analog states (or rather 2 states -plus neutral- on 2 axes), and there are also schematics for external adapters out there, but it's simpler in many ways to do it internally.

Just a couple resistors, a bit of soldering, and a few added wires (plus an appropriate cable/connector) and you're good to go.

Why would anyone want to use slower, inexact, longer throw analog joysticks for machines that already have something better. If you studied the VCS/A800 code, you have the capability to instantly read the joystick at any time anywhere. By going analog, you restrict to reading them during VBLanking (or some frame-based IRQ) and introduce the uncertainties and more complicated code. And the fast pot scan is even more erroneous than the frame-based analog readings. When the digital method exists, there's no reason to degrade to analog. In case of A5200, there's a very good reason to upgrade to digital joystick to get a better defined result for the 9-states although the interface is still analog.

 

Read it again: I wasn't suggesting long-throw or use of pots or other mechanisms for precise control (be it analog or digital), but a mehanism for a 9-state analog joystick with appearance and feel identical to the CX-40 (or better, CX-10), but being fully analog as such and functioning with the vectrex or 5200.

 

The mechanism is fully analog, using resistors tied to switches and wiring such that you have 3 states possible for the 2 analog leads (3 voltage levels: high, low, and neutral).

 

Thus, to the user, you can't tell the difference, but for the programmer/hardware you still have to account for the analogisity (for acceptable voltage ranges -and the corresponding digital output) and calibration at start up for establishing neutral.

 

There's no such thing as a digital joystick on the 5200 unless you have a game using the keypad for input and a hacked joystick outputting key presses. For normal games using analog control you can only use an analog (resistance based) controller, regardless of physical mechanism or throw (or whether you use paddles instead) including the use of analog switches pulling through resistors for very low precision analog. (only 3 general voltages per axis)

 

 

I'm just repeating what I said above though.