Of course. For games like Asteroids and especially Track and Field leaf switches are indispensable.
One is built for speed, the other for economy. As Darren has pointed out, games like Asteroids and Track and Field require a high rate of button presses. Galaga, Time Pilot, most early shooters that didn't have auto-fire designed into their games benefit the most out of leafs.
What's left then? Fighting games, Puzzle games, games that relied less on button presses and more on joysticks (Puzzle Bobble, Tetris, the Pac's, the DK's, Burgertime, Mr.Do etc..), you could get away with micro-switches for their buttons.
Personally I'd rather go for performance, mainly because I'm always looking for an edge to increase my score output.
You may say "I like micros better, because that's my personal preference", but really that just says you're either:
- content with your current gaming performance, without the inclination to increase your scores
- like the "clicky-ness" of micros
- mostly play games that don't require rapid button usage
- or you've never actually played a game with leaf-switches.
It really is "night and day" when you compare the two along side each-other during a game experience. Especially games that require rapid firing.
How much force does it take to move a leaf switch into making contact? I know it's not much, but surely it is measurable. You can also get microswitches with a 20 gram rating, which isn't much at all. Just curious as to how many grams it takes to activate a leaf switch.
A feather's touch. I don't have actual numbers, because well, I'm not a numbers guy. But I can say that if I were to compare it to lighter activation switches like say GGG Micro-leafs (which I currently have installed in my Canucks Cocktail cabinet) real leafs are pretty close to those. I like GGG's micro-leafs, they're a good compromise between both worlds.
But with real leaf-switch buttons, you're basically just fighting with the pressure of the button spring, and not really much from activating the switch.
It literally is a "feather's touch".
Micro switches are still more maintenance free. I'm talking about having to keep adjusting the leaf switches over the course of their life. You don't have to do that with micro switches. But like anything, when they break then you replace them.
Yes leafs require adjusting every so often, but really it's so few and far between to be any kind of hassle. Besides, taking a couple needle-nose pliers for a quick "bend and fix" is A. Less time and effort needed to swap out an entire switch, (arcade ops can appreciate that) and B. Over the long run, much more economic since you don't have to stock spares!
At my last job, I've had to maintain a few machines that had a high amount of user-traffic. Three of those machines (stand-ups) had Cherry micro-switches installed, one cocktail that had leafs. Every month or so I had to replace multiple failed micro switches at least two of the stand-ups, and not once had to adjust or fix buttons on the cocktail. I wondered to myself, "why don't these micros last longer? They're newer, and pretty simple by design...the cocktail got just as much attention as the rest, so what gives?". The simple answer that I could come up with was that arcade machines get rough-housed. I noticed that people tend to rapidly smash hit the microswitch buttons because it was the only way they can keep their firing-rate quick enough. What this did was it would rattle the internal levers of the switch, over time causing those flimsy metal pieces to bend or sometimes snap from repeated impact. Try telling someone to not smash the CP so hard when they're frantically trying to keep a high-rate of fire...
On the cocktail, (which had a 60in1) people mostly played Galaga, Time Pilot and 1942 on it. Games that required a lot of rapid button pressing, but this machine never had any button problems. I also noticed that people tend to play with leafs differently than micros. For instance, players that hit micro-based buttons tend to use the "index and middle finger - lift and slap" technique, while leaf-switch players tend to keep their index finger rested on the button, balancing the depress pressure between activation and de-activation. I'm sure I'm looking too deep into this, and I did get a few funny looks while being caught staring at people's hands while they played, and not the screen where all the action was.
Now the thing to keep in mind from my run-on-story here is that the games I had to maintained were in constant use everyday. With that amount of traffic, you're bound to have to maintain switches on the machine a lot more than machines that are for home-use.
If you have an arcade machine and think that button maintenance is an actual issue, then you need to be doing something else ... or paying attention to the 999 other things that needed your attention before the buttons got out of whack.
Exactly! Arcade maintenance is the nature of the beast!
Everything that has moving parts must be serviced every so often. Like your car. Would you want be replacing parts of your car every so often with new parts?
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Topic: Buttons: Leaf or Micro-Switch? (Read 18181 times)
