At 03:39 PM 11/4/2001 -0800, you wrote:
One suggestion: For the shifter, instead of using the difficulty
switches for the shifter, I'd use a "tap" signal on the accelerator
If it were only possible to go into reverse when the car is in neutral, a
tap method might be safe. But it might still be confusing with people
accidentally going into reverse. With the difficulty switches you could
throw it into reverse at any time, and then you could have some cool tire
burning sound effects. Reverse always accessible acts as a brake
also. Taking your finger off the accelerator may not allow the car to slow
down fast enough to execute quick direction changes. There will definitely
be a lot of fine-tuning, matching the speed and intelligence of the targets
to the performance characterstics of the cars.
You could also have an annunciator in the score area to indicate
that the transmission is in reverse. I think this would be quite
playable without requiring the console to be in arm's reach.
The cool thing is, there are two unused bits with the driving controllers.
You could hook up two separate buttons to it. That might break
compatibility with Indy500, but if I am just reading the rightmost 2 bits,
then no problem for new games.
And if you added in Booster Grip compatibility, then you'd get a total of 5
buttons available for this or future driving controller games, or 3 for
joystick games.
So you could have an accelerator, brake (which the arcade game lacked), and
two utility buttons. I'd probably only use one for the reverse. An
overabundance of buttons is a problem with modern games. But it's nice to
have them in case a new game needs it.
Anybody looking for a hardware project?
You could probably make a resin or fiberglass cast that the driving
controller could slip into and the buttons would be on the right side, and
you'd have a pass-through on the DB9 jack that you plug into.
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