Boray wrote:Paddles jittering - It's just the pots in them going bad. The more you use them, the better they will get. Try to just turn them for a while and they will improve. There are also different sprays you can spray into them, but that is not recommended by everyone. I did that on the volume controll of my stereo (a spray called 5-56) and it became as new. 5-56 is my universal fixer. I even repaired a 1541 by spraying a tiny bit into the motor.
Leif a.k.a. Schema posted the other day in Usenet about his paddle problems. I wonder if he has taken measures as far as spraying the pots.
If I owned a pair of paddles or other analogue controller, I could probably knock together a simple ML testing program (if Basic is not good to test jitter). I could do it anyway, but I wouldn't know which results to expect.
On the other hand, there are other paddle games than Clowns - e.g. Pinball Spectacular or Raid on Fort Knox IIRC - which you could try just to see if the jitter effect is as visible in these games.
carlsson wrote:On the other hand, there are other paddle games than Clowns - e.g. Pinball Spectacular or Raid on Fort Knox IIRC - which you could try just to see if the jitter effect is as visible in these games.
I've tried several VIC paddle games now - Skibbereen, Clowns, Pinball - the paddles jitter on all of them. However, paddle games on the C64 seem to work, with the same paddles.
Schema wrote:I've tried several VIC paddle games now - Skibbereen, Clowns, Pinball - the paddles jitter on all of them. However, paddle games on the C64 seem to work, with the same paddles.
After suggestions that real Commodore paddles might work better, I tried a pair of genuine C= paddles on brain's VIC20 at SWRAP. They were awful! The jitter was so bad that they basically either read minimum, or maximum. I used Clowns as a test. I couldn't see how even cleaning could fix such a severe problem.
I did a few more tests on my "no-name" paddles (for Atari, I think) and found that only about 1/3 of the paddle range is used.
I'm tempted to try building my own, using brand new potentiometers to see if that complete solves the problem. It's probably not too hard.
i couldn't vote for "Samus" - it wasn't in the poll
http://www.atariarchives.org/ccc/chapter1.php
that link tells you about how to modify the paddles so you can use the whole pot (instead of just 1/3 of it) with resisters added to the circuit
the chip that reads the paddle postion (VIA 1 or 2) interprets it like a voltage meter digitally
i haven't actually tried it yet
'jitter-free' paddles are all over eBay
i asume the seller got them really cheap and just cleaned them up
or someone undug the landfill with all those Pac-Mans in it and found a bunch.....
Lloyd Mangram wrote:That's the trouble of these type of 'favourite game' threads - A lot of people will not necessarily agree with the thread-starters choices!
If you're not happy, then just start another thread then...
If you read the start of the thread, then you will see that I let everyone who wanted to, to nominate a game... I would not have included some of the games if it were just up to me...
I was going to suggests votations.com, but they have just closed business. However, if the VIC-20 community wishes to extend the activity to more than a forum (i.e. Denial becomes the general unifying VIC-20 resource), it is of course possible to set up off-forum polls about best, most underrated, most strange games etc.
but...
