(jazzy music)
Greetings and welcome to LGR Oddware
where we're taking a look at hardware and software
that is odd, forgotten, and obsolete.
And today's thing is the Scacetec IMC SpaceOrb 360
game controller, joystick, game pad, mouse alternative thing.
(chuckles)
It's got a big rubber ball on top, and some buttons,
and it's supposed to make your life way easier
when it comes to playing 3D games,
especially those with six degrees of freedom.
Yeah, let's check it out.
So this is the Spacetec SpaceOrb 360
"Real Life 3D" game controller, whatever that means.
It cost $99 when it first launched in late 1996,
and is an alternative input device for 3D PC games.
Now there's a new way to move in 3D!
Max out your 3D games with killer scores.
Perform any move imaginable.
(laughs derisively)
I mean, I can imagine quite a lot, so
That is quite the claim indeed.
This whole box is filled with late 90's marketing nonsense.
I can't help but love its inflated claims.
As real as your own life, maybe more.
The heck does that even mean?
"What is real?"
Apparently it means that this chunky looking controller
is as intuitive as balls, literally!
It has a ball on top that you twist and fondle
in order to control the latest 3D games circa 1996.
Games like Descent, Quake, MechWarrior 2, and Duke Nukem 3D,
or any DOS or Windows 95 game
according to the back of the package here.
Something we'll have to put to the test.
I've always been quite curious about this thing
because while it resembles an analog game controller
mixed with a track ball, it connects via the serial port
and is entirely digital.
So yeah, it doesn't work like a traditional game pad
or a track ball.
Instead of a rolling sphere or an analog control stick,
you have a rubber ball mounted on a control arm
filled with multiple input sensors inside
to provide 10 bits of precision
using Spacetec's patented force and torque converter.
This was conceived by John Hilton,
a mechanical engineer and graduate
of the University of Sydney, Australia.
He originally called it the Screwball
when applying for a preliminary patent in 1985,
but it was named the Space Ball
by the time it hit the market in August 1988.
Now, these first iterations of the device in the late 80s
and early 90s weren't meant for gaming though,
but were instead geared towards professionals
in need of 3D input device with six degrees of freedom.
In the early 90s, the company took on the name Spacetec IMC
headquartered just north of Boston, Massachusetts,
and made a bunch of 3D input devices
that were then licensed to and manufactured by companies
like HP, Silicon Graphics, IBM, and Logitech.
For example, the PS1 version of the SpaceOrb 360
was produced by ASCII Corporation
and sold as the ASCII Sphere 360.
But games were never Spacetec's bread and butter.
That was computer-aided design and manufacturing
where Space Ball devices were licensed to companies
for design work.
As a result, their devices ended up being used
in countless projects, big and small, on this planet
and beyond.
NASA famously used Spacetec technology
in controlling the Sojourner Rover
as part of the Mars Pathfinder mission in 1997.
So you'd think that the late 90s would have
been a great time for Spacetec, right?
Eh, not so much.
Despite an optimistic outlook in their press releases,
Spacetec suffered a $3.7 million fiscal loss in 1997,
followed by a $3.3 million loss in 1998.
Considering the entire yearly company revenue
was just $8.9 million, that was pretty substantial.
Heavy layoffs hit Spacetec on the 19th of October 1998,
eliminating 20% of their 66 person staff.
And this was followed up by an acquisition by Labtec
just a few days later.
And of course, Labtec did much better
with Logitech snapping them up for $125 million
in January of 2002
and proceeding to roll up the Space Ball products
into their 3DConnexion brand.
So yeah, considering the fact that everyone
from McDonnell Douglas to General Motors to freaking NASA
used Space Ball devices, there has to be something
to this SpaceOrb 360, right?
Well, let's get it unboxed and find out.
I was pretty lucky to find this new on ebay,
'cause these things developed quite a cult following
over the years and can be darned tricky to find,
especially new old stock like this.
First up is the controller itself, which feels... okay.
Its build quality doesn't exactly instill much confidence
consisting of six squishy plastic buttons
housed in an even more plasticy shell
that brings to mind the crappiest Mad Catz controllers.
The rubber Space Ball itself feels quite nice, though,
with a sturdy design and some quality rubber
that's comfortable to grip onto.
And on the end, you hit a nine pin serial connection
with a 25 pin adaptor included
just in case you need an adaptor for adapting adaptations.
Then there's the bag of goodies
consisting of a CD-ROM containing the controller drivers
and SpaceWare Real Life 3D software, ooh.
There's also a registration card
to let Spacetec know that you've bought one of their things
and what input devices you're replacing with the SpaceOrb.
And finally, there's the 21 page instruction manual
introducing you to Orbis, the GameMaster, the GameHead.
Aw, geez. (chuckles)
Ah, the late 90s never change.
So the whole idea here is to treat the Space Ball
like an angry emoji or something.
Basically if you imagined the ball represents your head
in 3D space, then moving around in 3D space
should be as intuitive as moving your head.
All right, that's enough gimmicky documentation.
Let's get this thing plugged in and set up
with an appropriate PC running DOS and Windows
and try out a handful of games SpaceTec recommends
and one or two that they don't.
Okay, so I've got the SpaceOrb 360 plugged in,
software installed on the recently repaired Lazy Green Giant
that just had a power supply go out.
Very easy to fix.
And yeah, at this point, we have an assortment of icons
that are provided for us.
We've got a (chuckles)
a chicken demo, a bunch of guides and help things,
interactive trainer, customizer, monitor,
and the SpaceOrb promo.
Let's just start with this, 'cause this is amusing.
(rhythmic mechanical music)
- [Promo Dude] Are you still fighting futuristic aliens
with these prehistoric controllers?
Well if you are,
get ready
for the smoothest, most realistic gaming experience on the planet,
the SpaceOrb 360.
It will take you to a new level of interaction.
As 3D as your own life,
maybe more!
-Okay, they were trying very, very hard
to make this thing cool, and really,
it's kind of cool enough as it is.
I don't know why they were trying so hard.
But yeah, let's just go for the interactive trainer
because this is actually pretty darn useful,
and here's where we get to converse
or at least interact with Orbis.
(retro video gaming music)
And there's something about the atmosphere of this program
that I really enjoy.
You'll see.
- [Orbis] Welcome to the Orbitron Citadel.
It's here that I'm going to train you.
There are two ways to use your SpaceOrb 360.
In the vertical position,
with the nose pointing at the screen
or in the horizontal.
I'm going to teach you in vertical.
It's easy.
First, I'm going to teach you how to move forward.
Place your thumb on the triple arches,
the back of the power sensor.
Push straight forward towards the screen.
Try it and stay on the path.
Follow me.
No, you cartwheeled right.
(LGR chuckles)
Okay, now go left to the wall.
Follow me.
No, you twisted the ball left.
(LGR chuckles)
- [LGR] I didn't mean to.
Let me try again, man.
- [Orbis] No, you pushed the ball right.
- [LGR] What the?
Hold on.
- [Orbis] Push left like this.
- [LGR] I got it.
- [Orbis] No, you twisted up on the ball.
(LGR chuckles)
You have to be very gentle.
- [Orbis] Awesome, StrafeMaster.
Let's try a spin.
- [LGR] StrafeMaster!
I've mastered it now.
Anyway, with the lesson's over with, you're just free
to wander this space and just experiment with the controls,
which it doesn't actually let you use all of them.
In fact, it doesn't let you use any of these.
It doesn't let you use the tilting this way or this way
or up and down.
It's able to do those two, but you need like a six degree
of freedom game in order to accomplish that.
Otherwise, you're just kind of wandering this
very enjoyably surreal 90s VR type space
with all this graffiti on the wall,
presumably of, like, people that were on the team
making this or something,
and there was like a random Thresh reference over here.
Thresh kicks butt.
And then there's like these ants that come out
of different objects and stuff.
I don't know. It's just surreal and weird, and I love this kind of stuff.
(VR ants squeak)
(VR applause noises)
Well anyway, we'll try one more thing here.
This is the Spacetec IMC chicken demonstration.
(chuckles)
This gives you more of an idea
of what you can actually do with the ball,
so you know, there's the movement.
I'm just sort of tilting this way.
There's twisting.
You can actually make it go up and go down
and, you know, backwards and forwards,
and you know, just there's all sorts of ways
you can twist this guy around and yeah,
it's very creaky and actually feels like it's gonna break
at any time,
but it does work
because it has that 10 bits of precision or whatever.
It feels kind of analog, really.
It's interesting.
Okay, so let's go ahead and get to some actual games here.
So the monitor opens with Windows
if you have it set to do that, and that will open up
whenever you open up either the customizer or the monitor.
It will open this same thing here,
and this is really just a configuration menu
for all sorts of things, and these are all the games
that it comes pre-configured to work with.
It's actually just looking out for the executables
to execute, and when it does,
it will attempt to automatically configure the game
to work with the device here, which is important
because this really is relying on software
to do pretty much everything as far as I can tell
because again, it's plugged into the serial port.
It's not connected like a joystick,
but it's not connected like a mouse either.
Like, you might plug into COM1 normally, but yeah,
it's sort of an in between.
It's its own thing.
It's relying on drivers in this software
to sort of inject itself into certain games
and then maps certain movements and actions to all of this.
We'll come back to this in a minute,
so let's just try some of the games
that it's pre-configured with first.
Okay, we're gonna start with Descent 2 here.
Six degree freedom game, should show this at its best,
so to speak, and as you can see,
it actually created a SpaceOrb pilot profile for me.
Apparently it needed to do that
in order to get some of the inputs to work properly
according to the help file that Spacetec included,
and yes, you do still have to use mouse and keyboard
for the menus and such because I don't know.
It just doesn't have them mapped to anything
on the inputs here.
And it's not controllable with a joystick in the menus
in this particular game.
So
here we go.
(electric zap)
And really, I mean, this is about as intuitive
as this device gets.
(blaster shots echo)
It really is just, you know,
the same controls we were seeing in the trainer program.
You know, moving forward, moving backwards,
strafing left and right and stuff,
but in addition to that, you can tilt up and down,
move the whole ball up to move up and down.
And then there's these kind of things here
to spin yourself around, which is, you know, pretty handy
to have them all in one spot in theory.
(chuckles)
However in practice, I don't like it.
(chuckles)
Just for the fact that it puts so much strain
on both of my hands and wrists.
'Cause yeah, otherwise, it's actually, you know,
this is not the worst.
But already, man,
my hand
is just
absolutely crying out for me to stop.
(chuckles)
Oh my word, it hurts.
So here's the problem.
Because this thing is so stiff,
I'm having to constantly move it around
and grip this a whole bunch.
Like, my hand is turning red there,
how much I'm having to grip it,
and the grips are just awful.
The ergonomics are terrible.
It's super uncomfortable.
There's not enough space on this side
to both grip the controller and the ball,
and because moving the ball any little bit at all
moves the rest of the controller,
you're having to either grip really hard right here,
or grip really hard right here, or in my case, both.
It just is painful.
That's all it is, and I'm sure I could get used to it a bit
by using it even more, but yeah.
This is honestly the best situation
that the SpaceOrb can be in
in my experience with it so far, and that's not a good sign.
All right, let's try something else here.
We've got Quake, so this is a proper first person shooter.
It's in 3D and all that kind of stuff,
so we're going to have to use the keyboard here
to get into it, and yeah, so this was interesting
to try out because here you have, you know,
your typical FPS style gameplay,
which
(chuckles)
in this particular case is downright painful
and very disorienting.
Not only is it super sensitive
so you have to use fine, little movements,
and again, I have the sensitivity cranked way down,
so this is a better situation.
But yeah, you're moving and looking with the same input,
and that's just not a good idea at all.
I'm barely moving it here, and you can see
that it's looking and moving around,
and just that tiny little bit of movement.
So when you're trying to do it all at once
and you're in the middle of a firefight,
(gunfire)
Whew.
Okay, where'd that dog go?
(gunfire, character screams)
It's not the best feeling, and again,
I'm already feeling that wrist strain.
I know that part of that is because
I just have wrist problems anyway, you know.
I get all the things that you get from working on computers
all your life, and carpal tunnel and all that good stuff
is happening, so.
(guns boom)
Yeah, wrists hurt anyway, but with this,
they are really being stressed in ways
that they do not like, twisting and contorting
and putting constant pressure.
I end up getting motion sick.
Like, I'm already feeling a little gross
(chuckles)
because of the wobbly movement and everything else.
I'm just trying to strafe around and stuff like that.
I just want to move.
Oh no, screw this.
However, for a 2.5D/3D first person shooters
like Duke Nukem 3D here or Blood or Redneck Rampage
or Shadow Warrior or any of those kind of things,
I think this is much more suitable
when you have the view stuff turned off.
So there's no looking around even though that is an option
in this game if you wanted to.
Otherwise, I think this makes much more sense
because you have auto aim
(gun blasts)
so you don't necessarily have to aim yourself, and that makes sense.
It's like a 2.5D shooter anyway.
It's using that raycasting and all that stuff. So.
(chuckles)
It's still crap, but
it's more tolerable crap.
I'm not even gonna try.
That's just way too difficult with this thing.
But...
(gunfire)
(groans in frustration)
And again, I have the sensitivity turned down
and it's just absurd.
This doesn't make any sense for shooters.
Something like Descent or Forsaken or Radix: Beyond the Void
or you know, Terminal Velocity, sure,
but not first person shooters,
and yet it's configured to work with so many of them.
I know this was before, like,
mouse and keyboard became dominant, but good grief.
Okay, let's try something a little different.
Monster Truck Madness, a racing game.
So this I thought would kind of make some sense
because, well, it was configured with it,
but it also has that sort of analog kind of thing going on
with the controls here, so we'll just try this out.
- [Computer] Get ready.
- [LGR] I can see there it's moving the steering wheel.
- [Computer] Go.
- Yeah, the thing is, though, with a game like this,
you have to hold forward
on the joystick to accelerate,
so I'm having to press forward all the time
in order to accelerate or back to brake,
and that is just not a good time, man.
But you know, the steering actually is pretty good
'cause you're just twisting.
So this is actually not the worst controller
for racing games.
In fact, it's better than, like, a joystick
or even certain analog sticks that I've used.
It's certainly better
than just like a digital control method
like using the arrow keys on your keyboard or something.
I just wish that, and that's down to the game,
I wish that you could change, like,
accelerate and brake to, like, these.
(car horn beeps tunefully)
But instead, they're just horns,
and that is completely up to the way that this works.
Like, see these.
You can only map certain things to the face buttons
on a game pad or joystick.
And that's sort of another point here
is this really is just emulating a joystick
for the most part.
For instance, with Earthworm Jim here.
Now, this is another game
that it came pre-configured to work with.
All of these that I've tried so far have worked
right out of the box.
I haven't had to do any kind of configuration myself,
and this is interesting, though,
because in platformers like this,
it actually relies on the tilting left and right.
(chuckles)
And then, like, this is down and that's up.
(machine gun sounds)
And wow, this game is really quiet without music.
But yeah.
(bird shrieks)
It's totally playable.
I mean, I don't kind of recommend it, but it can be done,
and it's actually a little more comfortable
than some of the other games that I've played,
especially like the shooters and stuff
because I can just grip it with this one hand kind of.
That's still not comfortable,
but this I can get a better grip on the ball,
and then just sort of move, you know,
left and right this way
because it's just treating it as a digital, you know,
kind of a one bit control input here.
There's no analog finesse kind of feel
that I have to worry about.
It's, you know, just tilting it the tiniest little bit
to the left and right
means that I'm moving Jim left and right.
So all right, stop eating me, birds.
Ow!
(chuckles)
Yeah, again, don't recommend it,
but it's completely playable
and more so than maybe you would anticipate.
One more thing to check out here, though,
and that is we're gonna go back to the configuration thing,
customizer, and you can add your own games.
You remember the claim on the back of the box was like,
"It will work with any DOS or Windows game"?
Well, that's only kind of true.
(chuckles)
You have to keep in mind, it is going through the COM port,
the serial first one of those right there,
so it's not really a joystick or a mouse or a keyboard
Or anything, it's just its own thing relying on its own software
and drivers to function.
So it doesn't show up as a joystick by default in DOS games
and this configuration thing does not inject itself
into DOS programs, and I checked the documentation,
and it pretty much confirmed my suspicions there.
But the DOS games that it is configured with like Doom
and Duke 3D and all these others, they work,
but that's because it comes with a configuration file
to get it working,
and that's something you had to download more of
from the website back in the day.
However, Windows games, it doesn't necessarily configure
to work with all of those either, so for instance,
I set it up with Ski Free just to be stupid.
But this doesn't even do that because Ski Free is a game
that you either play with a mouse or a keyboard,
and this doesn't emulate either one of those.
It's only emulating joystick controls and like a throttle.
So yeah, this does nothing for Ski Free.
You can move it with a mouse and keyboard,
but you know, what's the point of that?
And you can't actually customize these
in this program either.
All these button actions have to be done
within the games options menu itself.
And then all these do, you can just switch around
between the different joystick functions,
and it will emulate those and let the game know
that's what, you know, these are mapped to,
but otherwise, yeah, all you have is sensitivity
and this skill level thing,
which that just is the master sensitivity.
If you want to add a game, though, that is in Windows
and does have joystick support natively,
then this will let you do that,
and you can get any of those games to work pretty much.
So for instance, I want, say, maybe Jazz 2 Holiday Hare.
(Model M keyboard clickity clacking)
You have a type of game you can select from.
This is a platformer, so whatever.
We'll just choose joystick emulation,
and then this will tell the game to treat this thing
plugged into the serial port as if it were a joystick
plugged into the game port.
And really about the only thing we need to change here
is just if we want the axis to move left and right.
We'll have to choose that right here,
which will be joystick right/left,
and then we'll switch this back
to whatever that function was that Jazz 2 does not use.
And again, we can't configure the actual buttons.
Have to do that in Jazz, but by default,
it uses six buttons anyway, I think,
so it was pretty much fine when I first tried it.
So all we have to do is run Jazz 2,
and it works just like a joystick.
So we have menu controls and the buttons work
because it's a game that is functioning with a joystick,
and the menu is too, and here we go.
It's pretty much just Jazz 2 with weird, tilty controls.
(chuckles)
And this game treats joystick controls as digital.
Yeah, just moving a slight bit left and right
will mean that Jazz starts to move,
which the SpaceOrb is not the worst thing in the world
with platformers like this for that reason
because it actually makes it easier on my wrists and hands
and it's kinda pointless, but it can be done,
and it functions a little better than you might expect.
That's really about the highest praise
I can give this whole device.
It functions a little better than you might expect sometimes.
But other times, like in an actual 3D first person shooter,
it's just garbage.
Most first person shooters, really
unless you're talking about those six degree freedom
type of games, and
yeah, that's pretty much all I got to say about this thing.
And well that is it for the Spacetec IMC SpaceOrb 360 thing.
Yeah, you know, it's an interesting device.
It's not as bad as I thought it would be,
but it's also not particularly great either,
at least not to a degree that would make me want to use it
for any length of time with anything,
and that's not to say I don't get it
or think the Space Ball things themselves are a joke.
I mean, I've used some of the actual Space Ball devices
meant for 3D modeling.
Those do make sense,
and they're a heck of a lot more comfortable
and useful, I think.
You know, they've got the hand rest and the palm rest
and they're just better designed for what they're meant for,
but this, sticking it on top of a game controller,
much less a not very ergonomic one.
I don't quite understand.
However, I do understand that there are a lot of people
that still like these things.
In fact, some of the websites that are online, like, there's fan sites.
I guess they used to be up.
Some of them aren't anymore, but you can find archives
of some of the SpaceOrb communities
that have put out new drivers,
and there's even something called the Orbotron
that lets you convert this and make it work
with more modern machines and games and such,
and then of course, there's also the Space Mice website
and a bunch of other things just dedicated
to all of these kinds of devices.
Obviously they have a following.
It's not that I don't get it entirely. It's just that I'm not a part of that.
(chuckles)
I can't, you know, it's just too uncomfortable and it hurts my wrists too much,
and there's too many better options these days.
That being said, it's a fascinating piece of oddware,
and I would be very much interested to know
if you ever used one of these back in the day
or more recently, if you loved it or hated it,
or if you're like me, and you're just kind of in the middle
that thinks it's an interesting thing and, you know, that's about it.
You're in no rush to actually use it again. (chuckles)
Wherever that may be, though, let me know in the comments,
and I hope that you enjoyed this episode of LGR Oddware
at the very least.
I like doing these things any time that I can.
I've always got more oddware planned, so stay tuned.
I have new videos every week.
And as always, thank you very much for watching!