I went to an arcade yesterday

[SpatzST]

in Brooklyn, NY, called barcade.  its a bar and an arcade!  Played some Satans Hollow, Gauntlet, bubble bobble, among others...

So while I was playing, since now I kind of know how these games work, I noticed how doughy feeling most of the joysticks were... is that the feel you get from leaf switches in the joysticks? There was definitely no clicking of microswitches (or atleast I couldnt hear it any)

[chopperthedog]

Combination of the leaf switches and most importantly the rubber centering grommet used on most original stick designs.


good day.

[jennifer]

    I have always kind of preferred that on my builds, that's how they were when they were new. Although Jennifer still has yet to prove this, on leaf switch games (like Ms. pac) a quick turn will sometimes zoom you through a ghost.... The board would be the logical place to start looking into as why, but I keep thinking its the rolling (mushy) effect of the leafs.... Again Jen has yet to prove this theory.

[chopperthedog]

    I have always kind of preferred that on my builds, that's how they were when they were new. Although Jennifer still has yet to prove this, on leaf switch games (like Ms. pac) a quick turn will sometimes zoom you through a ghost.... The board would be the logical place to start looking into as why, but I keep thinking its the rolling (mushy) effect of the leafs.... Again Jen has yet to prove this theory.

Answer at around 4:15




good day.

[jennifer]

   OMG, that guy is FUN (laugh and laugh.... Jenn sings along **Here in the T/Z, giggle) That shop kind of looks like my house, little project nooks of disaster games all over the place, All Jennifer needs now is the cute guys hiding behind them eating lunch (and laugh some more).... But as for what he said, I did NOT know that!! and quite possibly could explain the cause and effect.

[Le Chuck]

    I have always kind of preferred that on my builds, that's how they were when they were new. Although Jennifer still has yet to prove this, on leaf switch games (like Ms. pac) a quick turn will sometimes zoom you through a ghost.... The board would be the logical place to start looking into as why, but I keep thinking its the rolling (mushy) effect of the leafs.... Again Jen has yet to prove this theory.

It has nothing to do with the eyes and it wasn't a feature. 

Taken from http://home.comcast.net/~jpittman2/pacman/pacmandossier.html#CH3_What_Tile_Am_I_In

It wasn't too long after the release of Pac-Man when word began to spread of players occasionally passing straight through a ghost unharmed, seemingly at random. This rumor turned out to be completely true as most die-hard Pac-Man players can attest. If you play the game long enough, you will eventually see Pac-Man run into one of the ghosts and come out unscathed on the other side—it doesn't happen very often so enjoy it when it does! Some players have even gone so far as to incorporate this mysterious pass-through oddity into their patterns.

The root cause of this elusive peculiarity lies in the way the game detects collisions between Pac-Man and the four ghosts. Any time Pac-Man occupies the same tile as a ghost, he is considered to have collided with that ghost and a life is lost. It is irrelevant whether the ghost moved into Pac-Man's tile or Pac-Man into the ghost's—the result is the same either way. This logic proves sufficient for handling collisions more than 99% of the time during gameplay, but does not account for one very special case:



The above picture illustrates the conditions necessary to produce this curious behavior. There are five consecutive frames showing Blinky and Pac-Man passing through each other. Below each frame is the same scene represented by the tiles they currently occupy and the per-pixel location of their center points. Pac-Man and Blinky are at just the right position and speed relative to one another to cause them to swap tiles with each other simultaneously. In other words, Pac-Man's center point moves upwards into Blinky's tile in the same 1/60th of a second that Blinky's center point moves downwards into Pac-Man's tile, resulting in them moving past each other without colliding. Note that Pac-Man's origin point is centered on the top edge of his tile in frame four; this is still considered to be inside the bottom tile, but moving up one more pixel will push him over the edge into the next one. Pac-Man and Blinky have now swapped tiles with each other in frame five, and Pac-Man can go on his merry way because he never “collided” (i.e., shared the same tile) with Blinky at all!

[jennifer]

    That totally would explain the how, And it usually happens in a turn when positioning would be @ its most vulnerable state, This would however bring my attention back to the C/P, the leafs would act differently than snap triggers allowing for more of a combined signal (Or so I would think anyway).

[kiwasabi]

So while I was playing, since now I kind of know how these games work, I noticed how doughy feeling most of the joysticks were... is that the feel you get from leaf switches in the joysticks? There was definitely no clicking of microswitches (or atleast I couldnt hear it any)

Yeah the leaf switches have no feel to them which is why I don't like them. If I press an arcade button I want it to have a nice springy click feel to it. I initially tried leaf switches on my cabinet since I heard they are MUCH more reliable (an operator told me he NEVER had to replace switches in his Nintendo cabs because they all used leaf switches), but just couldn't accept the lack of feel to them. One of the techs at Game Exchange of Colorado said microswitches are actually more reliable because they're smaller, thus less easily tangled up, etc. Of course if you know how to properly wire a control panel then this should never be a problem.

[SpatzST]

Combination of the leaf switches and most importantly the rubber centering grommet used on most original stick designs.


good day.

Ah ok the rubber grommet I didn't consider but that makes sense.

As for the leaf argument going on here. I use leafs in all my pushbuttons and I have no problem with them, my joys however use switches.  It was interesting to note the amount of force and click some buttons required to press on different games.