It should produce characters on the screen and move the cursor from side to side on the line. Now, rotate your spinner or move your trackball. Type: cat /dev/input/mice and press enter. If you have movement, you should be able to configure MAME to use it.Īnother test can be performed at the command prompt. This can also help you troubleshoot the connections for X and Y inputs. Testing Mouse Inputs in LinuxĪ convenient hardware test is to simply boot the Pi to a desktop and see if you can move the cursor with your trackball or spinner. The key to making this hardware work on the Raspberry Pi is to ensure that the interface behaves like a USB mouse. There are several options available from Ultimarc, Groovy Game Gear, Happ, and others. Fortunately, arcade hardware is available that will work, and often comes with (or is compatible with) a USB interface. Attaching a trackball or spinners requires a USB interface. Spinners can also be setup like a mouse with separate X and Y tracking (like an Etch-a-Sketch).Īdding a USB mouse to a Raspberry Pi is trivial. For trackballs, the input is practically identical to a mouse. Hardware for Emulatorsīecause mouse input is ubiquitous on modern computers, spinners and trackballs translate nicely to emulators that can accept input from a mouse. In this respect, a spinner is also like a mouse that only moves in a straight line (left/right or up/down). By rolling a ball that is in direct contact with the spindles, trackballs can provide two-dimensional input like a mouse.
Trackballs are essentially the same but they have two spindles oriented perpendicular to one another. Optical sensors detect the movement of the encoder wheel and forward the speed and rotational direction to the arcade game. Spinners operate by rotating a spindle which turns an encoder wheel. Spinners, Trackballs, and Lightguns are often described together because they are seen as mouse devices by the operating system. Although RetroPie is often able to accommodate the use of a joystick instead, many popular titles are best played with their native controls.
Lightguns were common accessories for both arcade and console games. Spinners and Trackballs appear on the control panels of many arcade classics. Spinners, Trackballs, Lightguns, Mice Overview Universal Controller Calibration & Mapping Using xboxdrvĬonvert RetroPie SD Card Image to NOOBS Image
Setting mouse indexes via the RetroArch GUIĬonfiguring RAW, PS2 for all possible mouse inputs Validating, Rebuilding, and Filtering Arcade ROMsĬonfiguring RetroArch emulators for mouse-like device use