Once upon a time (1999-2001) there was a game console called Nuon by VM Labs, this console was also a DVD player.
Toshiba and Samsung both released DVD players with Nuon inside, and 4 DVD movies were released by FOX with Nuon "special features".
In total, there are only 8 games published for Nuon.
Only one of those games is worth playing: Tempest 3000.
Tempest 3000 is of course a sequel to Tempest 2000 (Jaguar, PC, MAC, Saturn, PS1) which is a spiritual sequel to (wait for it...) Tempest. Notably Tempest 3000 is only available on Nuon.
Now here's where the story gets interesting.
Jeff Minter (YaK)'s company, Llamasoft developed Tempest 3000 using a "spinner" type controller, but such a controller was never released for the system.
A complication in getting this feature functional is: unlike the Jaguar system, where you can hack a rotary encoder to the button inputs on a standard controller, the Nuon has a chip, called the "Polyface" chip, inside each controller.
This chip tells the console what "features" the controller supports, like quadrature rotary encoder (spinner), analog sticks, shoulders buttons, etc.
By extracting entries from the BIOS we can see there were DOZENS of controller variations that were going to be supported, steering wheels, fishing reels. Almost starting to sound like the Konix Multi-System, another Jeff Minter vaporware special.
There were even provisions in the chip configurations for VMU functionality, memory card support, serial I/O, micro controller interface and 3D shutter glasses, but so much for over-engineering.
So that's the background info, we're getting close to making this actually work, we've electrically interfaced the quad encoder to the GPIOs on the Polyface chip (thanks to some dug up reference documentation on the Polyface chip and a home-brew controller dump program), and now it's just a matter of brute-forcing the correct configuration resistors to expose it to the system the way the game expects.
Proof:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Bw2qdIn1-AE
Pray to the llama.
