I recently finished coding my VFD style Wreck It Ralph game, so it was time to get the spinner working. Like MAME, my game detects mouse X-axis movements as a left/right spinner.

I purchased a cheap rotary encoder on amazon and got to wiring it to my minipac. This was actually really easy. The minipac already has spots to connect an actual arcade spinner and convert that to mouse movement. All I had to do was connect the appropriate wires to the encoder. I used the KY-040 encoder. It isn’t great, has very low resolution, but most importantly is the right size for my miniature build.

While it wouldn’t play many spinner games perfectly, it gets the job done. It’s more for show/fun anyway. The idea that such a small machine has a spinner in it. See a video of it in action below.