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| The Control Panel Files by Ice Cream Jonsey 06/22/2006, 4:37pm PDT | ||||
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| Welcome to the Control Panel Files. The ultimate goal is to create a MAME cabinet. It should be noted that this cabinet will be created by someone who hasn't done any wood working or soldering since middle school.
It should also be noted that you have options in addition to making the panel by hand. It may even be cheaper to have someone else do it, although I can't say for certain. SlikStick can create a control panel to your specifications, for instance. The first thing I wanted to do is buy a spinner. There aren't a lot of games that require one, but there are more than you might initially think: driving games work really well with spinners. The Atari 2600 paddle games can benefit with one. The games I personally wanted to enjoy again were Discs of Tron and Tempest. Rather than get an authentic Discs of Tron unit, I decided instead to keep my refrigerator. It's a choice you'll have to make for yourself, either way. There is a guy over at Retroblast who did a roundup of various spinners. His roundup is here. The guy went out and picked up an actual Tempest unit from eBay to perform this review. There are certain people I'd never fuck with, and the Retroblast guy is one of them. He knows his shit and doesn't care if people think he's crazy. He has affiliate links, but I get the impression that he made friends with people that made good stuff, rather than be a shill for advertisers before he reviewed their stuff. Unfortunately, you may not have as many options as he did. Aside from having to hunt on eBay for a Tempest spinner, the guy running Oscar Controls has stopped shipments indefinitely. But there are also two spinners not included in the review -- the first is from a guy selling them at www.ezarcadesolutions.com. That's the one I ended up going with for my first control box experiment due to the low price. The other is a newly offered spinner from Groovy Game Gear (though that one was reviewed later). The EZ Arcade Solutions guy is helpful, ships quickly and puts out a decent product for the money. It was recognized just fine in MAME32. The arcade feel of it varies: my girlfriend used to live with an Arkanoid cabinet, and she said that the feel isn't the same -- she was able to cover the entire field of play in Arkanoid by giving its knob a half spin. That isn't possible with the EZ Arcade one, no matter how sensitive. It's fine in Tempest, but I would probably go with the Groovy Game Gear one for the actual cabinet I (eventually) (hopefully) put together. Oh, and the EZ Arcade spinner uses a USB connector. Warrants mentioning. No driver issues. There are actually two buttons inside the unit, but they are difficult to activate. It's nice that they are there I guess, but you're eventually going to want to real buttons, which we'll discuss next post. One last thing that I learned: the spinner used in Discs of Tron is actually a push-pull spinner. You know how there were 4 year olds in the bowling alley that didn't understand the concept of attract mode? So their parents would leave them in the area with the machines and they would sit there and hog the machine, even though they weren't actually bringing the ghosts out for their introductions and nicknames. Apparently I was that kid when places in front of Discs of Tron, because I have been playing it for 20 years (including through MAME for Christ's sake) without realizing that you could affect the tilt of your discs, in addition to their direction. I don't currently know of a push-pull spinner that is available on the market. Is there a hidden push-pull mode to on-line first person shooters? Because I fucking suck at those, too. Next post I will discuss my crushing disappointment trying to buy buttons directly from Happ and getting together something for an Asteroids layout, which is all buttons. the dark and gritty...Ice Cream Jonsey! |
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