HOW TO: Replace a joystick with a Trackball?

LeeB99

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I KNOW that this is probably a fairly easy thing to do, but doing a search on Google revealed nothing. It should be pretty straightforward, because I have an old Wico tracball that works on the 2600 and other similar "old scool" systems as a direct plug-in. It works EXACTLY as you would expect it to, even though the original hardware was designed for a traditional 8-way joystick input. Anyone on here have any experience with doing this???
 
NOTHING??? I was able to find the schematics to convert a trackball game to run on a joystick but not the other way around. Could it be as simple as providing power to the trackball and wiring up the up/down/left/right wires appropriately? I searched on Happ's website, and it would appear that you either have the typical "arcade trackballs" and then the USB/PS2 variety (for use with PC's). What i want to do is run a trackball on jamma games that usually use joysticks. Surely SOMEONE has done this before???

Lee
 
Here is the wiring schematic from the standard 6 wire trackball connector:

Black to Ground
Red to +5V
Yellow to 2nd player UP
Green to 2nd player DOWN
Brown to 2nd player LEFT
Blue to 2nd player RIGHT

Reverse it.
 
Perhaps i wasn't 100% clear as to what i am looking to do. I am wanting to use a trackball in place of a joystick on a jamma game that was originally designed for use with a joystick and the standard 4 inputs from an 8-way referenced to ground. Since there are "x" and "y" signals plus the two "clock" wires for each, I did not know if there was a way to directly wire each up/down/left/right wire up directly to a particular trackball. In your description, you are talking about wiring it up to the "player 2" portion of the jamma harness, so i suppose that perhaps you are referring to hooking up a trackball to one of the Chinese 60-in-1 boards or something?

Lee
 
Maybe I'm misreading everything posted so far, but it seems to me that Kraj's link from priglmeier's page (above) is exactly what you want. :) From the link:

The trackball used in this game connects to where a joystick would have been; what was: up, down, left, and right is now x-direction, y-direction, x-clock, and y-clock, respectively (dir and clk for short).
 
I just went back and re-read the page. It is referring to how you wire a tracball into a jamma harness on games that are designed for trackballs (such as the bowling game used in the example). Golden tee or world class bowling seem to be the types of games that are referenced.

In these cases, the games are programmed specifically for use with a tracball. I am wanting to see how a tracball can be installed/used in a game that was programmed for a standard joystick interface...

Lee
 
OK. There are only 6 wires for a trackball.
Black is ground.
Red is 5v.

Instead of a joystick, use the following wires on the trackball for the up/down/left/right action.

Yellow UP
Green DOWN
Brown LEFT
Blue RIGHT

This will put you where it sounds like what you want! :)

I did this on a DK and thought it was fun for about 5 minutes. Then those damn barrels got in the way....
 
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