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Wha? you mean Marat isn't running a totally successful business?

sorry. I couldn't even say that one with a straight face.

I'm not too worried. the image is already copyrighted by Oscar Controls, and has been in commercial use for ages, as MAMEworld.net uses it for all their banner advertising. not to mention all the people contacting the USPTO on the MAMEdev's behalf.

if I were a MAMEdev, I'd be contacting the Electronic Frontier Foundation about this.

maybe a certain Site Admin or two should start a campaign to email the USPTO to make sure this never goes through.

here is some prior art found in commerce: http://www.oscarcontrols.com/gallery01.htm

Note the info at the bottom:

"
THE ABOVE DOWNLOADABLE IMAGES ARE PROVIDED IN CONFIDENCE FOR THE LIMITED PURPOSE FOR PERSONAL PRINTING AND ARE NOT TO BE REPRODUCED NOR COPIED IN WHOLE OR IN PART NOR LOANED OR OTHERWISE COMMUNICATED TO ANY THIRD PARTY, NOR USED IN ANY MANNER WITHOUT PRIOR WRITTEN CONSENT FROM OSCAR CONTROLS.

Copyright © 2003 All Rights Reserved. All images and contents are copyrighted and may not be copied or distributed in any way. Custom graphics and custom MAME designs are copyrighted and may not be used on other web sites without prior written consent from Oscar Controls.
"

Compare the one in the trademark application, to any of the copyrighted images here. Hmmm, something looks familiar . . can you spot it?

Oscar Controls makes spinners (even a Disc of Tron push/pull spinner!) for MAME cabinet purposes.

All high quality stuff, and Oscar has been a great contributor to the Build Your Own Arcade Controls community (msg board) All the above links are great for info on making mame cabinet, desktop controller or otherwise interfacing "real" arcade controls with your PC.

e.

What you want is a Vortex Spinner from Oscar Controls.

The best place, bar none, to go is Build Your Own Arcade Controls. Hint: Happ is spendy. Consider Imperial/Betson. Google for them, and you can find TBs for $30-ish. Oscar Controls Sells a nice TB Harness->USB adaptor for around $12.

Now, can you use a circular saw without losing important bodily appendages? _that's_ the real trick, you bet.

I e-mailed them (a while ago) to ask if their software supported mouse emulation, as in twisting left would scroll the mouse left and vice versa, and they said the PowerMate does not do that and they don't plan to ever add that feature. I even mentioned how much people spend on creating their own knob controllers and how this could be a new market for them if the added that one feature (which I can't see being very complicated, really) but they weren't interested. I sent links to arcade sites and all, to emphasize the size of the market (mostly, that I just wasn't making this up in case they hadn't ever heard of it.) Their software only lets you set it up to control software they already support, or software controllable by keyboard shortcuts. Seems insane that a knob like that would translate into keyboard commands, but...

Secretly, I'm hoping someone's written their own drivers or something for it. I'd buy a PowerMate just for this, if it did, but since they said it doesn't I haven't bothered. I've searched everywhere for alternate drivers or info. Anyone have any ideas?

If someone doesn't know what we're talking about, here's the web page ... it's a universal knob with a USB plug, and looks killer, except for the lack of mouse support...

Possibly you could config it to use the keyboard and reconfig MAME to take keyboard input instead of mouse/trackball, but I doubt you'd be able to get the fine control you'd want from a setup like that... especially after shelling out for a killer knob, man it just kills me, it would be perfect!

Out of all the computer hardware you probably have to destroy, old hard drives top the list for security and privacy reasons. Although taking apart the hard drive is good, it's time consuming and difficult if you have a lot of computers to dispose of. A better solution would be to subject it to the magnetic field of a degaussing coil. The magnetic field of course is strongest along an axis that passes through the center of the coil, so making small circles and passing the HD through it should be enough to kill it. This is also handy for the paranoid who are afraid to have their data found to have a smaller version wrapped around a hard drive attached to an alarm mechanism.

Oscar Controls has a great fly wheel spinner that is almost Identical to the Atari Spinner. That's what we use in the Primary LaserMAME Cabinet. But to save on Shipping it out from Ohio, we are using one that is already out there.