Vaus Test

I recently won a copy of Arkanoid (loose cart + controller) on eBay. A few days later, I made a test program for the controller. I've only tested it on an NES, but the Famicom mode works in FCEUX.

Vaus Test (updated Sunday 2013-11-10)

So the character just moves left or right? No trigger action? What is the significance of the two balls?

As usual: mind if I add this to here?

It's a quickie mod of my sprite demo to have the character follow the position of the pot.


A on controller 1 hides the balls, and the trigger shows them again.


Top ball and brackets: Raw (inverted) pot readout, with maximum and minimum readings since reset.
Bottom ball: Pot readout normalized to be centered around 128. The character seeks this.


Go ahead. If I get a chance, I might make this test more thorough to see exactly how long it takes to sample the pot.

I had a vaus test program that displays the value horizontally, a sprite, and an indicator of the button being pressed years ago. It should work on hardware, my game did with the vaus and the code is identical.

The black outer shell of the cable where the covering met the case had come loose, as the original listing showed, so I duct-taped it up so that the wires inside wouldn't detach even farther. This means I might slip and call the trigger the "A Button".

0.02 is out. It has a greatly expanded manual and two new test screens.

Turns out it takes about 8 ms for the sampling process to complete. So don't try reading it faster than twice per frame, and don't read it twice in a row the way you would to detect DMC bit deletions on a standard controller. However, you can calculate the current acceleration by taking the difference between the value at time t-1 and the average of the values at times t and t-2. If its absolute value exceeds about 10, something glitchy happened.