OK yes this is a bit of a shameless necro of one of my build threads. But I never did get round to making a video of this little machine. However, I did attend Replay 2011 in Blackpool over this last weekend where my machines did get some nice attention. Here is are a couple of videos of my stand including the Star Wars cab: (First video at about 1:30 he moves over to Turnarcades stand with their excellent cabinets and minis
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I did get some really useful feedback there too from some very experienced Star Wars players. Remember I never had an original cabinet to compare gameplay with so at Blackpool I was hoping some good players could say whether it was right or not. Well the results are in.... and it was close but no cigar!
I got the same sort of messages from quite a few people. Namely that there was a bit of a deadzone on the crosshair which stopped players from following tie-fighters smoothly. Plus there was a really annoying jittering of the crosshair when it was in the bottom 20% of the screen. This wasn't so noticeable in game but it was clearly visible when players went to put their initials on the high score table. It was practically impossible to select those letters accurately on the bottom line. This is something I never really noticed before but it was clearly there. This is the kind of constructive criticism I really wanted though. No point building this thing if it doesn't play correctly.
Well I finally solved all those issues today! The deadzone is set at 0.3 by default in Mame and I thought I'd already tweaked it. But I forgot I had a separate vector.ini which overrides the main Mame.ini and that was still set at 0.3! Setting it to zero cured the deadzone issue.
I also learned today that with any analogue device such as this you need to set all the digital setting in the TAB menu to zero or else they can conflict with the true analogue settings. Once I did this the jitteryness of the cursor completely disappeared.
I still need to get some feedback on the actual speed of the cursor. I currently have the sensitivity set at 50 for both X and Y co-ordinates. Some players said it did seem a little sluggish to get from one side of the screen to the other which was more noticeable on the tower stages. That may still need tweaking but again I need an experienced player to advise... that or get it side by side an original cabinet. But it certainly is playing better overall than it was before.