I sometimes try to play Apple 2 games on the AppleWin and am confused as to how the emulated joystick works. It seems that the Apple2 had an analog joystick. How do I handle an Apple2 joystick on the emulator? Same with the mouse?
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In post #1, "Harry Potter" asked:
" How do I handle an Apple2 joystick on the emulator ? "
Uncle Bernie comments:
I don't use Windows much (unless forced by software I need not having a Linux version), so I use Linapple on Linux, but I'd think that Winapple is the same as far as the joysticks are concerned:
you just plug in any USB joystick and launch the emulator
... and all is fine. So far I did not encounter any game I was interested in to need an 'analog' joystick. And many games which support use of joysticks have a 'joystick calibration' function in which they ask you to push the joystick up, down, left, right, so they can find out for which 'analog' reading from the game port they should do that motion.
For my work on the Replica IIe I use Atari joysticks with an interface card having some resistors and transistors to turn it into an 'analog' joystick, despite it is digital. You can find these schematics on the web (no time to look them up right now).
The reason behind not using / fully supporting 'analog' joysticks is that most early 1980s Apple II games use the keyboard to move things around and the 'fire' button is the space bar in most cases. Since a key switch is digital in nature, the game programmers did not implement support of the finer information an 'analog' joystick could produce (and just as a sidenote, I used to play DOOM and QUAKE on the PC just using the keyboard - much faster controls than any joystick).
I think that the 'analog' joystick function in the Apple II game port was never meant to be used for joysticks. Woz himself stated that all he wanted to do is to program and play a 'Pong' type game on his Apple II. For 'Pong', you need 'paddles' and only a simple speaker able to make beeps. I think this 'design objective' explains why the Apple II game I/O is how it is.
- Uncle Bernie
It is pretty self-explanatory when you take a look at the Input tab under Configuration:
AppleWinJoystickAndMouse.png
Thank you, but the problem I'm having is probably with calibration, namely, I'm not getting the results I want from the cursor keys. How do I handle [b]that[/b]?
There is no analog joystick emulation using the keyboard in AppleWin. If you want that, you need to attach a real analog joystick to your PC. Otherwise through the keyboard you only get the extreme positions: N, NE, E, SE, ets.
I don't want that. It's just that the emulator doesn't register the keyboard joystick properly. For example, sometimes, centering the joystick registers as all the way left. That's why I'm asking.
Yes, there is a bug in the latest version of AppleWin that was introduced recently, causing SW from the keyboard to go to 0,11 instead if 0,255 but you can use an older version:
Bug.png
May be this is not bug in AplleWin, but fixing to be as is in real system.
A have same behaior with MECC test and one of my joysticks. May be this is bug in MECC, because with other joistick test programs it works.
You're right! After hitting SW on the numeric pad:
Basic.png
CVS: I believe you were right in the first place, as that would explain the erroneous results I'm getting from the joystick emulation.