stella mouse curser moves off play screen

[irongiant14]

I'm using the mouse as a stand in for a paddle controller in Stella emulation. The trouble is that the mouse curser doesn't seem to synch up with the edge of the gamescreen, so there's an awkwardness to the play. Even in fullscreen mode, there seems to be a point where the mouse keeps going and the -- for instance the bucket in Kaboom -- stays still. Can this be solved with the mouse or is it hopeless?

[+Random Terrain]

If everything goes well, we might have Atari 2600 style paddles for the PC later this year.

[aftermac]

This is the exact reason I bought my Stelladaptor... there is just no substitute for real paddle controllers.

 

Stephena, would be the one to give you a definitive answer on the mouse question.

[+stephena]

I'm using the mouse as a stand in for a paddle controller in Stella emulation. The trouble is that the mouse curser doesn't seem to synch up with the edge of the gamescreen, so there's an awkwardness to the play. Even in fullscreen mode, there seems to be a point where the mouse keeps going and the -- for instance the bucket in Kaboom -- stays still. Can this be solved with the mouse or is it hopeless?

There are a few mouse fixes coming in the next release of Stella (which will be early next week). One of them is a issue where the range wasn't large enough, and (for example) the last card in game 4 of Activision Casino couldn't be reached. But I don't think this is what you're experiencing.

 

If I understand correctly, you're talking about a 'dead zone' where the mouse doesn't do anything. If so, this is actually correct emulation for the paddle. On a real paddle, only 1/4 or so of the range is used in Kaboom; the rest is a dead zone. If you turn the knob too far on a real paddle, the same thing would happen in Kaboom. So from this point of view, no, it can't be fixed. And I can't just scale the zone down either, as that would cause problems in ROMs that do use more of the full range, such as Night Driver and Casino.

 

A few suggestions:

 

1) If you're playing in windowed mode, make sure you grab the mouse with Control-g. This way, the mouse won't wander off past the end of the window. But you're still going to experience the 'dead zone'

 

2) As others have suggested above, try to locate a set of real paddles. There's nothing like the real thing, and Stella supports the Stelladaptor and paddles natively (ie. there's absolutely zero effort on your part to get it working). But you'll still experience this 'dead zone'.

[irongiant14]

I wanna thank you guys for the excellent replies and apologize for taking so long to acknowledge them. I completely forgot I posted this and then came upon it tonight searching for "stella paddles". I just saw the 'enable email for replies' option.

 

I guess i'll look into finding some paddles for the stelladaptor.