Tyrant

Interesting. I'll admit I know very little about the ChaosReins controllers, but all of mine have used a detented (clicking or stepping) encoder, with 36 steps per revolution. I'm pretty sure all of the ones by Jonathan Ascough have used the exact same encoder as mine.

Hmm... not those, they have a rectangular profile. The outer profile of the nuon plug is indeed a classic D shape, but much smaller. The inner opening is rectangular, with four contacts slightly recessed in on the short side of the D. When my flatmate wakes up I'll see if I can steal his camera and take some decent photos, with a metal ruler along side so you can get an idea of the dimensions.

Thank you, I found what looks to be everything I need, mostly in this thread: http://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=2254

I took a few pics for you, it's not easy to get my cameraphone to focus given the tiny size of it, but I did the best I could. Its very similar in construction to micro-usb, except smaller, and where micro-usb has slightly raised contacts, the nuons seem to be slightly recessed.

All nuon controllers (bar one) have analog, and it is just left-right variable speed. It's fairly handy, but still not as cool as a rotary. Also unfortunately the Logitech controllers lag REALLY badly with their analog sticks, so its often better to use the digital pad. Now that is awesome news. I thought it was too good to be true. Still, some of the JagWare lot are pretty handy when it comes to reverse engineering electronics and signals, right? Perhaps a project someone over there might be interested in? The issue of the plug can always be worked out somehow... A plug solution: Take one normal nuon controller. Cut off the plug and a short length of cable. Attach a common plug and line socket (4 pin mini-din maybe?) to the cut ends of the cable. Thus they can still plug into each other to function as before, and the adaptor can also plug into any newly made/converted controllers.

Having given the matter some thought I see that you have a very good point, I stand corrected.

http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/94279-optical-rotary-controller-project-completed/page__st__25__p__1811573entry1811573 Interesting, added a reply in that thread. I vaguely recall that the Nuon controllers are supposed to be standard USB controllers, only with a different connector. Doesn't solve the other problems, though. Now that is interesting... very interesting. If that's true it would open up quite a few possibilities.

Why not simply use a dpdt switch? The two centre pins going to the internal "left" and "right" traces, with the switch toggling between routing them back to the original d-pad contacts or to the rotary contacts? It would work just fine on the encoders I use, which are mechanical ones with 3 legs (left, right, common).

Indeed, here we are . As a friend of mine once put it: Aspire to Inspire before you Expire. How hard? not very, as long as you can brace things so the pause button still works. It's not really a spat, I was a little upset many years ago, since Jon released his first one about a week after buying one of mine, but everything was explained and resolved loooong ago, there's no ill feelings on my part. True 'dat. Not quite. There's also JediJeff, who made and sold them before the dawn of time itself. I've got three ready to sell, and I'll put them up on ebay sometime in the next few days (and of course let the forums all know). I used to sell some to Nick Harlow of 16/32 Systems under a similar arrangement. I've actually got an idea I'm planning out for a new controller, but I won't talk about it until I've actually got at least a prototype ready. B2k can't support anything other than a D-pad, can it? Since Curt just released the B2k source code however, it wouldn't be beyond the wit of man to adapt it to use ordinary rotaries, and even auto-detect them, the way T2k would if we were following the techref doc (note: anyone attempting this, throw away the rotary description in techref, it's idiotic and nobody ever followed it) T3k would be cool with a rotary, but a) I don't think he included code for them, and b) where on earth would you find nuon-compatible plugs? let alone the custom chips used to encode the data to the appropriate serial stream. I suppose the protocol could be reverse engineered and the chips replaced with off the shelf parts, but the plugs alone would make such a project a nightmare. Really? pah! not me, I think its great to finally hear from you. I was mostly out of the scene when you got started making yours, but it's good to finally have this little "chat". I wish you luck with yours, and any future projects. Where the ancient kings are buried New kings will rise and stand And so the torch is always carried Passed from hand to hand.

Not only is it in the game, it's coming from a music engine that owl wrote himself! That guy really knows how to code.

Wow that's going to take a long time to go through, but looks to be some absolute gems there, many thanks. Quoted For absolute, unquestionable Truth.

I've never looked inside one of the G series (gray rubber) pads, I would have assumed the plastics and boards are identical, but having just now opened one up I see they are quite radically different. I don't remember you giving me your word not to make them out of B series pads, but that would help to make a clear distinction for the future as to who made which ones (since all of mine have, as you said, been black rubber ones). I forget the specifics, but I remember someone mentioned that when they pushed one button, several others also acted as if they were pushed. I had a quick look at the upper pcb of the pro controller and spotted some diodes near to the d-pad that would cause that effect if you had cut them off and not replaced them. At least that's how I remember it, but I've just had a search through AA's epic back-history of posts and can't find the thread, so like I said all I've got is my rather vague and degraded memory. Yep, I can agree totally, having ones honesty brought into question is a horrible thing, especially when done so in public. For the record I feel no hostility towards you at all, I accept that you developed your version in parallel (although the timing makes it look otherwise), and when I said "cloned" I only meant that the components you used are (as far as I know) identical to the ones I used, as well as the design being the same (I didn't remember the gray vs black thing). I hope no offense was caused.

Nope, you're still there in the top spot. JFUK 2k9 was, in my humble opinion, really rather awesome. Numbers were down from previous years, but the atmosphere was good and the venue was simply amazing. Next years event will almost certainly be in the same place. I'll put my photos up later on, once I've sorted through them (and uploaded the videos of Nick H singing Cool for Cats).

Screenshots really can't do this game justice. It's really smooth, the texture mapping looks gorgeous, the voxel landscape looks even better, and the lighting will really give you a feeling of being in the world.

3DO sounds really weak when you consider that it was named thus so it could take its "rightful place" along side the stereo and the video, it was to be the 3D-O.

I'm looking to understand how STSpeech.tos works, with the hope of porting it to other platforms, and before I go poking about trying to disassemble it myself, I figured it would be smart to check incase anyone either has the source, or has done a disassembly of it before and could help me pick it apart. I know, a bit of a long shot, but it's such a commonly used voice I'm hoping someone has already taken it apart to see what makes it tick (or rather, speak).

You'd have to make sure the emulation was spot-on with the actual hardware (which means largely ignoring the spec). There are so many hard to reproduce bugs in the custom chips, having an emulator that did things "right" would lead to a load of games that would only run on the emulator, and crash mysteriously on the real hardware.

I remember! Are you coming this year? It'd be nice to see you again.

Thanks for the show of interest. I'll definitely go ahead and make as many as I can find parts for. As for prices, what I did in the past was put them up on ebay starting at zero and let demand set the price automatically. It always seemed more fair (as if there is ever a fair way to distribute things when demand outstrips suply) to sell them by auction rather than have waiting lists or "the first ten replies get one" topics. Then again having said that, they consistently sold for £45 to £55 ($75 to $90, although the exchange rate was better then), and when I sold them directly (at JagFest for example) I set the price to £50. Yep, his were pretty much exact clones of mine. Except that he then went on to make some out of pro controllers, but didn't realise that a) Tempest doesn't benefit from the extra buttons, and b) when you cut circuit traces you need to patch them properly. I forget exactly what he did strangely, but it involved short circuiting some of the buttons together in a way that could have been easily avoided with a few diodes in the right places.

Isn't that what BattleSphere is based off? There's already a version of JagMania, although I'm not sure how many levels it actually has. Starcat started to write a version of Joust a few years back, but then dropped it. I think he lost the source in a hard drive crash. Uh... Battlemorph? There's a columns clone I believe, and a breakout clone, and a samegame clone, also Breakout2000. None are exactly tetris clones, but there are MANY block-based games out there.

Thanks but apparently I snore worse than Nick H so I've got a room of my own already sorted out.

This kind of bitching is what the community doesn't need. It didn't need it years ago when I was still active. It doesn't need it today. You all need to get a fucking grip and stop acting like 14yo's. Why must you all constantly indulge in so much fucking myspace-drama? Seriously, why?

Cool. I'm not actually goina take any pre-orders or waiting lists or anything like that, I've never been fond of those kinda things. This thread is just to generally sound out how much demand is likely to be if and when I have some available. As for pictures, sure. I'm currently testing the ones I've got here (for use at JagFest if there are enough spare tv's), so I snapped a couple of pics for you.

Hey guys, I've been hovering about a bit, and wondered if there would be any interest in another (fairly small) batch of Rotary Controllers. I'm running low on supplies (mostly mint controllers), so this would likely be the last batch I'd ever make. Would there be any demand though?

Y'know, money troubles be damned, I'm in (assuming the hotel still has rooms free). If anyone has a spare monitor I might even be able to run the classic T2k Rotary contest again.