Irritating Maze fix?

[ross_bay_cult]

Irritating Maze seems to don’t be able to use a joystick / d-pad to play? Unless I’m missing something - I know there’s been fixes in emulation - any chance we can get it working on mister? Thanks!

[DevilHunterWolf]

Joystick support for Irritating Maze was always a hack, never the way it was made. It's a Neo Geo hardware game but it had its own cabinet with a trackball. The UniBIOS does have a built in cheat for the game that lets you use the joystick but it's not analog control. It's just the 8 directions with buttons changing the speed. Previously, that's how you'd play the game on a MiSTer. The Neo Geo core as of a couple versions ago now supports mouse input so it's possible to play the game as originally intended. Unfortunately, Irritating Maze now ignores the standard joystick and button inputs so you can't open the UniBIOS cheat menu anymore, even with the input still set to Joystick. Older versions of the core you could use the UniBIOS cheat menu to add in joystick support, but I haven't found any way to get it to open on the latest versions. You'll either have to use a mouse (or trackball) or use an older version of the core before the additional inputs were added.

With the other trackball games available for the MiSTer, I ended up getting a USB one to use. The difference it makes for Irritating Maze was night and day to me. The joystick hack was a neat convenience to try out the game, but there's no way I'd make it as far without the trackball.

[ross_bay_cult]

Thanks for the info! Super interesting. Maybe I’ll grab a usb track ball! Is there one you recommended?

[DevilHunterWolf]

I didn't dive too deep into trackball research beforehand and picked one up during a MicroCenter visit. I ended up with an Adesso iMouse T50 because I wanted a bigger, arcade like trackball, not a smaller one meant for your thumb design. It's wireless and it has DPI adjustment buttons on it so you can change the speed on the fly. Not the best trackball, but it works well enough for the purpose and the mouse buttons are handy for things like shooting in Centipede. Better name brand ones tend to be a jump in price and I wasn't prepared to spend too much on something I haven't used in decades. I'm sure there's far better ones (including ones meant for arcade use) but that's something you'll have to decide if you want to spend extra for.

One thing I had to do was edit my MiSTer ini file. By default, the trackball was WAY too fast even on its slowest possible DPI setting. You can use a Windows app to reprogram the T50's trackball speed and such, but even the slowest setting was still too fast. My MiSTer ini didn't have the mouse_throttle setting in it so it took me a bit to find it was an option. I think I set it to mouse_throttle=10 which divides the speed by 10. It was much more controllable after that.