Alpine Surfer (Arcade) with Analog Flight Stick in MAME

[@WingburenArcade]

Cool game ❤️ have to add this for my HotasX

[@DarthMarino]

It's pretty basic though I would recommend the Alpine Racer games instead.

[@adamfreeman3652]

Considering the wii balance boards connect to the dolphine pc emu via bluetooth, Hopefully somebody somewhere has or will get them going in Mame eventually... I used to play a two player skiing game like this at the arcades that I am now going to spend far too long tracking down. :)

[@lounowell4171]

I've done this for Top Skater and Soul Surfer, works pretty well! Also tried with Air Trix, but that game's board is designed to spin 360, so doesn't work as well. I might upload a video showing how to do it, now that this is playable too

[@adamfreeman3652]

@@lounowell4171 That's great news! Does Mame see the balance board as an analog controller? So you can assign X&Y axis to movement?

[@lounowell4171]

@@adamfreeman3652 The method I used for Model 2 and Demul was to create a virtual joystick and map the balance board to that, so yep, any emulator that accepts analog input should be able to handle it :)

[@adamfreeman3652]

@@lounowell4171 Please can you expand on the Virtual Joystick part? Is this something in the emulators? Utilizing vjoy software? Or did you code it from scratch in java/unity? Thank you for the info. :)

[@lounowell4171]

​@@adamfreeman3652 Yep, using vjoy :) First step is to connect the balance board to the PC via bluetooth (same process as Wii remotes, lots of tutorials online for this) Ishachar's Wii Balance Walker program (found on GitHub) will be able to read the balance board straight away (lets you map thresholds on the weight sensors to digital inputs like key presses, mouse clicks, etc...) Then if you install the vJoy driver, the Balance Walker program has settings to map the weight sensors to the analog vJoy inputs. I'd recommend calibrating the virtual joystick driver in Windows at this point, so that it's using the full-range of analog inputs (by default it may go from 0 to 70,000 or whatever the number is, but most emulators will read 0 as centre, not left which would be -70,000ish) Then your emulator or game of choice, ideally, will recognise the virtual joystick as if it were any old controller

[@kendallarielle7885]

p̲r̲o̲m̲o̲s̲m̲ 👍