Quiz game buzzers revisited

[ffutures]

About a year ago I picked up a set of "Buzz! Buzzers" USB quiz buttons in a charity shop, and I've been trying to figure out how to do something useful with them.

The main idea was to build a simple setup for running a quiz game, of course. Except I got busy doing other things, no longer work in education, etc. However, I think it's still a possibility for e.g. quizzes at SF conventions, so (having decided not to give them to a charity shop) I've done some more thinking about how to make this work, preferably on my iBook G4 since that's my laptop.

The Buzz! Buzzer units have four controllers connected to a single USB cable. Each controller has a big button for "hit the button fast" rounds and four smaller buttons for multiple choice rounds. They're recognised as joystick buttons 1-5, 6-10, 11-15, and 16-20 on a Windows PC, with the first button on each controller the big one.

It turns out that the USB Overdrive X program (shareware) can detect them on a Mac and convert the button presses into keystrokes. What I want to write is a program that will either see who pressed the main controller button first, or record the first button each player presses for a multiple choice round.

My starting point for this is this article

http://lowendmac.com/lab/06/1007.html

which mentions Chipmunk Basic, a very small Basic for macs. I've installed it and it works OK, as does the sample program in the article.

What I was hoping here is that someone here might have some old Basic program listings for this purpose that I can try to adapt to work with this combination of hardware and software, since I'm no great fan of reinventing the wheel.

Anyone?

later - forgot to say that the basic program does work with the big red buttons on the controllers. I suspect that getting the multiple choice buttons to work properly won't be so easy.

Comments

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

It's a surprisingly fun game, the one the controllers came with originally, if you ever get the chance to play it.

[timill]

John Dallman wrote the BBC buzzer system. IIRC it stayed in a loop reading the user port, and exited when the value went nonzero, so it may not be applicable to these.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I seem to recall seeing a lot of machine code in that one - I want to do something much simpler, the listing I've found just uses the old basic "inkey$" command, with the driver program making the mac think that the controller buttons are keys.

The simple "which button was pressed first" thing is easy, that's pretty much the program as written, I just have to use the USB driver to map the main buttons to the right letters.

For the multiple choice thing I think I'll need to know which button was pressed, and who got there first if more than one person presses the same button. For that I think we have to enter the wonderful world of arrays. The snag is that there are 20 multiple choice buttons so it needs to be pretty fast going through the list of possible entries or it might miss the next press as it processes the first. I'm also not sure how to ignore the first button when processing the next, and so forth. It's a VERY long time since I've written any basic, or done any other programming apart from spreadsheets and HTML for that matter, so I need all the help I can get.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

It looks good on e.g. ebay but it uses pre-defined lists of questions; I want to roll my own. Also I don't own a PS/2

[ggreig]

Unfortunately I have no Mac advice, but you've just increased my eBay expenditure for this month...

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Don't spend too much, they're pretty cheap if you shop around.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Forgot to say that if you can make them do anything useful for Windows I would also be interested, there are plenty of Windows laptops at most conventions etc. I'd imagine lots of educational users would be interested in a program too, especially if it was cheap / free.

[ggreig]

I got a wired set at a reasonable price. Wireless doesn't seem quite so reasonable ,but might be worth it as there are possible work applications.

[ggreig]

It'll be a while before I have the chance to tinker, but I fairly quickly turned up this, which starts off with a bit of background about coding for USB devices and goes on to use the Buzz controllers as an example. Looks like it'll be a good starting point. (If anyone reading is interested in following this up themselves, you can get a free C# compiler by checking out the various editions of Visual Studio Express.)

If you give me an idea of what educational users might be looking for, I can bear it in mind.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

My mind REALLY doesn't work the C way - believe me, I tried - but if you can come up with anything useful I'd be interested.

Educational users would probably want the questions and (for multiple choice) the four possible answers on screen, so that they can use it with a file of questions rather than asking them individually. I think that might be too much hassle for a convention / pub quiz, so simply saying who pressed first with the "first to press" questions, and "who pressed which button, and who was first if more than one person pressed the same button" would be enough for most purposes. Another possibility is "press the buttons to show the order of the answers" questions, e.g. the order in which four kings ruled Britain, or four presidents ran the USA, as they have in some quizzes.

I should mention that commercial software for this is quite expensive, so if you come up with something good it may be worth trying to market it - the problem there is that the USB buzzers are no longer made, the wireless ones apparently have reliability issues.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Apparently the wireless ones aren't entirely reliable; they have handshaking issues.

[ggreig]

Thanks, useful guidance and I'll certainly let you know if I manage to make anything of it.