Atari Tempest, anyone?

[madscijr]

Here's another simple method of improvising a spinner with a mouse.
You can jump ahead to 4 min 40 seconds to see it in action:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=gWtsminHhi8

Very ingenious!

Isn't it amazing what folks come up with? Your standard optical mouse is nice and easy to work with - minimal moving parts and it just works off light! And they're cheap and plentiful. 
(It's even possible to plug in more than one and use QB64 to read separate input, although we haven't quite figured out how to get QB64PE to output graphics to the same screen that the API code reads the mice input from. If that gets figured out, then we could just plug in as many mice as there are players and use them for multiplayer games like pong, steering for driving games, aiming a gun, etc.) But I digress... One day I'll figure that out!)

I still plan on adding a weight to the shaft to see if I can get the feel of the spinner to match the Tempest knob, just haven't gotten to it.