So I have been working on my MAME cabinet and I got around to wiring up my controls tonight. I am using goldleaf push buttons and black E-Stiks. I chose the E-Stiks because they were supposed to be easy to install. I spent maybe a good two hours wiring up all the controls.
I got everything up and running and... Well... I don't know if I am a fan of the E-Stiks, they just feel off, I had a zippy joystick before and it didn't feel nearly as weird in my hands. Further, I keep feeling like the more intense a game gets, that perhaps the nut and washer under the panel are going to come loose. As a matter of fact, I already had one issue where the left on the player 1 joystick wasn't working right, like it wasn't making good contact. So I had to shut everything down, remove the panel, make sure everything was tight and then start it up again, sure enough, now the left was working again.
Another thing I am quickly learning is, 4-way games don't really play well with 8-way joysticks. Of course the E-Stik allows for changing between 4 and 8 way via a dial under it, but it feels kind of a pain in the ass having to shut everything down and changing the control scheme just because of that. And yes, I do shut the cabinet down, because I tried while it was on and hit some contacts and got a jolt. Nothing bad, but I didn't care for it either.
It seems to me, it'd just work better to have a dedicated 4-way cabinet and a 8-way cabinet. I guess in the future that's what I'll think about.
I do have a quick question, I power the entire thing on and off by unplugging it, it's never been an issue before. MAME is running a 2-player version of TMNT: Turtles in Time, the first time I played, it was fine, when I shut it down and tried again later, it started to boot up, but then kept giving me an error about some bad ram. Is there like a folder or save file or something for that? Because I've no idea how to fix that. If anyone can throw me an idea what I can do to fix that, I'd appreciate it.