Sticky buttons?

[pmc]

I have Happ horizontal mount microswitches (cherries) and an IPAC. I daisy chained the grounds.

Everything usually works fine, but sometimes a button is not responsive, sticky (not mechanically), or only works when depressed. For example, my "pause" button sends a "P" but sometimes only works if I hold it down. That's fine if your beer is in reach.

Bad ground? Loose connectors? I did use the bigger quick-disconnects so they are slightly looser.

Sometimes in Tetris a peice will refuse to rotate -- it rotates back into the original position when you let up on the button. So you whack it again and it does it again. So you keep whacking. Just before the piece settles into place it rotates cleanly and then once more cause you are still whacking the button!  

Time to fix this. I'm sure it's a common connection problem. But what's the easiest way to locate and fit it?

- Patrick

[Lilwolf]

Is there a chance that it's mame and a background service started?  (you can usually tell because the whole game will slow)

But are you holding down the button?  Or do you press/release it and a second later it shows up?

But get rid of the disconnects.  Having the wrong size ends up biting you at the worse times.... and you will constantly have a few that will fall off.

Bob Robert sells them pretty cheap and hes a good guy.  

[allroy1975]

I had something similar I think.  It was mostly with my joysticks not working properly.
I'm 99% sure it was a wiring problem.  I had foolishly used Cat5 (solid) wire to wire the whole thing up and that doesn't hold the female disconnects very well.  I ended up re-doing the WHOLE CP and all the grounds with some like...22 guage stranded wire.
Since I did that I haven't had ANY problems with ANY of my controllers.
it was a total pain though...
but I'm glad I did it.
Matt

[pmc]

I think it's the wiring (or something with the IPAC. Though when I boot to DOS, the key-strokes seem to appear just fine. I  had assumed it was a connector problem and the behavior would be obvious to someone (like a loose ground in the chain somewhere).

I have the right sized disconnects -- picked them up last weekend at a flea market. So at some point I'll rewire (I need to take the panel apart to add artwork and the lexan overlay anyway). I'd even consider soldering the wires to the controls since I can't see why I'd ever remove them anyway as I'll be building additional swap-in panels for other input devices.

Thanks for all the feedback.

[pmc]

Changed my mind. I just noticed (I'm on the cab right now) that in Robotron I suddenly couldn't move up. So I tried the keyboard. Nope. So I quit back to Mamewah and everything worked fine. So I ran Robotron again. Within' seconds the "up" stopped again. No keyboard up either. So I ESC to Mamaewah and can instantly arrow-up to the previous game entry. Maybe the IPAC?

Testing my "pause" button right now.... pppppppppp

I get a "p" when I depress the button, and another when I let go. Double-characters. Hmmmm.....

It's a little crowded under there. I  might have some contacts bumping each other.... maybe....

[JustMichael]

Sounds like a possible wiring problem.  Make sure all grounds are only connected to the COM tab (common) of the microswitches.  Make sure the inputs going to the IPAC are only coming from the NO tab of the microswitches.  If this is still occuring after checking for the previous, try swapping out the microswitch.  If the switch doesn't work in Mame, perhaps the keys for Mame got changed somehow.  Delete the "default.cfg" file in the "cfg" subdirectory of the Mame directory.

[grafixmonkey]

yeah it does sound like you connected to the NC tab instead of NO.  I could see that causing the program instability too, if their input handling wasn't quite so robust.  Might be overflowing an input queue or something.