Hey there again guys,
As the weather is wonderful today I woke up early this morning and hit two of the cabinets with Pac-Man Yellow, and Ms. Pac-Man Blue for a second coat. They look great but I will hit them with a fine sanding and give them a third coat and maybe a fourth. I will be able to start the stenciling process this weekend.
Now on to more pressing matters. In my post last night I mentioned that a fellow forum member Shanghaiguide helped me out with acquiring Generic USB joystick circuits from China. They were very cheap! I love cheap stuff, but only if it works well. I got the circuit boards yesterday and set about checking them with a test harness.
They were advertised on the Chinese website as being only 4 directional input for a joystick and 8 inputs for buttons. I was initially worried about having only eight button inputs for these projects. I want to make sure that anyone playing these cabinet can easily navigate MALA, MAME and other emulator software without having to plug in a USB keyboard. With this in mind 8 button inputs would be the bare minimum.
Imagine my suprise and delight when I plugged one of these circuits into my test rig, went into the control panel and checked the properties for it and found that these circuits not only support 8 but 12 buttons!!
I was also very pleased to see that these circuit are not only digital input but analog as well (at this point in my testing the gears are whirring madly in my head), I was astounded. For the price per board (a little more than 4 US dollars; more with shipping) I was very impressed. When I tested this rig with MAME and several other emulators I was extremely happy with how it handled.
The joysticks that I ordered, with help from Shanghaiguide, were pretty solid and fairly well made. I was pretty happy with these in general, but the ball tops were not up to snuff. They had clearly visible lines from the injection molding process around the ball top as well as a dimple on the top of the ball, but with the price I paid I don't believe this is much of a problem. I noticed on their website that they had many different classes of Joysticks as well as ball tops. One other thing to keep in mind if you order from this company is that the joystick shafts are not universal so you won't be able to switch a ball top out for one from Sanwa or Seimitsu. The joysticks were very responsive and extremely durable.
All in all I can say that I am extremely happy with my purchase and will continue to purchase components from this company in the future. The site is all in Chinese which made things a little difficult, but since I read Japanese (we use many of the same Chinese characters) it made things a little less complicated.
Here come the pics, I hope you found my review informative. Back with more construction pics in the next few days.
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Jigenjuke