Yazzie Remastered: no controller support?

Paladin (875)

03-12-2020, 16:04

Hey all,

I got a long-awaited shipment from Matranet in the mail today (Relevo's Snowboarding! Menace from Triton! Awww yeah!), and one of the games I included in my order was Yazzie Remastered, as it looked really fun from the videos I watched on YouTube.

Weirdly, though, it... doesn't seem to actually support my controller?

The instructions say it supports keyboard or a joystick in port 1 (I tried port 2 as well, though, just to be sure), and even the title screen says "Press space or fire button" or some such thing. But... nope! No matter what I do, the game just won't recognize my controller at all.

Every other game in my library does, including Andorogynus (which is known to be picky about what kinds of controllers you use, with certain types not registering in-game properly). But for some reason, this game does not.

My system is a Panasonic FS-A1ST Turbo R, and the controller is an Arvel Joy Card.

Can anyone confirm if this is a known issue with the game? Does controller support for this game work on ANY system, or does the same thing happen to you guys as well?

The way I have my MSX set up, the keyboard is... not very easy to use as a primary control method, so if there's no trick to getting the game to recognize my Joy Card, I'm probably going to give it away to a friend or sell it in Akihabara.

Thanks for any info you can provide!

-Tom

Por Manuel

Ascended (17501)

03-12-2020, 23:23

Odd, in openMSX it does support the controller. At least the version of MSX dev.

By the way, I always play with keyboard I guess I'm too used to it... never could get used to joysticks and back in the day we didn't have these nice joypads for MSX in Europe. At least I never saw one.

Por Haze

Expert (114)

04-12-2020, 00:28

Oh, that's interesting! So it's not just me who's having trouble getting controllers to work with particular versions of the game?

Here's what I've tested just now, to make sure I wasn't imagining things:

Yazzie (original release from Retrosouls' website) on WebMSX and PC joypad works
Yazzie Remastered (from MSXDev) on WebMSX and PC joypad works
Yazzie Remastered (from MSXDev) on Zemmix Neo/SX-Mini+ with Panasonic FS-JS222/JoySNES doesn't work

Por wyrdwad

Paladin (875)

04-12-2020, 15:56

Manuel wrote:

Yeah, and for me, I grew up with game consoles, not computers. I mean, I did play a FEW games on my father's MS-DOS machine when I was little, and have some fond memories of them, but my older brother was a second-gen gamer who had all the consoles (Atari 2600, Intellivision, Colecovision, and even Vectrex!), then went on to buy a Sega Genesis years later when I instead chose to get an NES as my first console. So I was exposed to all the video game consoles throughout my childhood (one of my earliest memories is playing Astrosmash on Intellivision with my brother when I was 3 years old!). So for me, a game that doesn't support controllers hardly counts as a game at all!

It's pretty rare to find MSX games that don't, though. Yazzie is just an odd case where it's supposed to, and apparently does on some hardware? But doesn't on mine.

Very weird!

Thanks for the answers, though, guys!

-Tom

Por sd_snatcher

Prophet (3424)

08-12-2020, 03:06

@wyrdwad

What's your machine and which of the Arvel "Joy Card" models do you have? Can you post a picture of your joypad?

Also, what are the results of testing it with HIDtest, both in the normal and Generic modes?

EDIT: I've just recalled that you've already asked for help with both your "Joy Card" and WSX joystick ports on these forums, here, here and here.

So, are you sure that your setup is working correctly?

From this post, it seems that you're using an FM-Towns joypad, and not a real MSX joypad.

FM-Towns joypads are not fully backwards compatible with the MSX. Fujitsu never stated they were, and they're not wired according to the MSX specification. Just like you can use Atari-2600 joysticks on the MSX, but won't have full compatibility on the opposite direction. Sometimes even at a risk of frying your machine.

IOW, please test it with a real MSX joypad.

Por sd_snatcher

Prophet (3424)

08-12-2020, 03:09

Haze wrote:

Panasonic FS-JS222 doesn't work

Humm. I don't have this specific joypad, but I'll try to lend one from a friend to check what's its problem. I only have a FS-JS220 and it works fine.

Since yours is a real MSX joypad, I suspect that Panasonic might have done some design mistake on this specific model. It seems that it's not only on the MSX turbo-R audio mixer and A1GT jailbar galore that they made mistakes?

Por Haze

Expert (114)

08-12-2020, 10:23

sd_snatcher wrote:

Humm. I don't have this specific joypad, but I'll try to lend one from a friend to check what's its problem. I only have a FS-JS220 and it works fine.

Haha, I don't want to rake them over the coals just yet. Especially because the JoySNES also doesn't work (for me) in that specific situation. Your comment reminded me: I still have a few more combinations to try, with a few different machines and some spare joysticks. I'll see if I can get some more results, if that will help with our analysis.

I was just mostly very surprised to see @wyrdwad with a similar problem, but a different configuration.

Por wyrdwad

Paladin (875)

08-12-2020, 13:27

I don't have that Joy Card anymore. The one I use now is this one:

https://www.msx.org/wiki/images/6/6a/Arvel_Joy_Card_JOY_200.jpg

And as I said, it works perfectly with every other MSX game I've played, including Andorogynus -- which is an MSX game known for not working with off-brand controllers at all.

I'm also using a Turbo R now -- specifically, a Panasonic FS-A1ST.

Never heard of HIDtest before, but I can download that and try running it sometime soon. Not right now, though, sorry!

Thanks for your answers.

-Tom

Por sd_snatcher

Prophet (3424)

24-12-2020, 22:12

The Megadrive 6-button joypads have a feature where you hold the MODE button on connection to force a backwards compatibility mode with 3-buttons.

Inspired by that, I found a way to force a compatibility mode with FM-Towns joypads on MSX-HID. All you'll have to do is to hold the B-button for more than 1 second. This will enable a FM-Towns mode (with the extra buttons support when needed), and disable any further HID detection.

This mode will also cover any other miswired joysticks that connect the common pin of the circuit to the GND instead of the pin-8 of the DE-9 connector. This includes the Panasonic FS-JS222 (only the buttons are miswired) and the Panasoft FS-JH1 joywheel.

I added support for this on HIDlib and on the upcoming HIDtest v3.2. I'll also compile and release a new version of Yazzie Remastered soon that will use this new version of HIDlib.

I also reserved the "hold A-button" for a X68000 6-button mode in HIDlib, but Yazzie won't support this rare and expensive controller. It also doesn't seem to work correctly with any other MSX software.

Por sd_snatcher

Prophet (3424)

31-12-2020, 18:50

Done. Yazzie MSX remastered v1.1 is here, with the computability mode for the FM-Towns joypads and Panasonic JS-222. All you need to do is to hold the B-button for more than 1s and it will enable this mode. Have a happy new year! :D