Last night I had some friends over and for the first time I had four people banging away on the controls. Within a few minutes I noticed that HyperSpin started in the background and the primary controls in MAME stopped. Doing some reading it appeared to be related to shift keys, or macros. I mapped out the special keys - Ctrl, Alt, Shift, etc. and it seems to have solved the issue.
I have toyed with the idea of using a coin box rather than a coin button, but the advantage of a coin button is that it can be a play button for four player games that require more than four buttons. I know those games are the exception but it still gives me options.
I am fully aware the surface looks massive, but the distance from the TV is what's important and I don't think I'd want players any closer to the screen. I'm scratching my head trying to reduce the size of the CP.
Here's the current look:
I threw on some copper coloured laminate just so it doesn't look like raw MDF. Please don't mistake this setup for anything approaching a final form; this is purely a test-bed and I threw laminate on it just for fun.
The finished control panel will be poly or acrylic over graphics, but I decided to try my hand at laminate since I intend to wrap the final sides with graphics and this was a consequence-free test run.
The wiring of four players is enough to send my mild perfectionist tendencies into a fit, so with the additional wiring required by LEDs in all the buttons I'm strongly considering doing custom wiring rather than using pre-made wiring bundles.
I do have a few issues I'm looking for advice on:
Issue 1 -- My P3/P4 controls each have 4 buttons plus start and coin. I have numbered them 1 2 3 4 since that made the most sense. Coin and Start can be used as play buttons for modern games like Castle Crashers, but most 4p games only really use 2 or 3 at most. I chose a 7 button layout for P1/P2 to accommodate 6 button fighter layouts and to match the 1 2 3 4 layout of the 3rd and 4th player setups (Neo-Geo style). The layout ends up looking like:
5 6 7
1 2 3 4 and 1 2 3 4
It's great, except when I play a fighting game it ends up being a 2 on 4 layout rather than a 3 over 3 like it's supposed to be. I want the four player layouts to match the first four buttons of the two player layouts, but I also don't want to screw up the two-player fighting games. Is there a clever numbering system or will I have to remap all my fighting games to skip button 1?
Issue 2 -- Dragon Ball Fighterz and other fighting games won't let you map keyboard to player 2. I have read about people using vJoy and UCR but I haven't had any luck using them so far. If anyone has a link to a detailed guide I'd appreciate it.
Issue 3 -- Last night I fought the urge to streamline the machine to two players, using joypads for players three and four rather than dedicated sticks and buttons. I'm already considering replacing the sticks for players one and two with better quality (quiet) sticks.
I know the machine looks massive but my favourite childhood memories in arcades were the 4 player machines. This machine will see most use during parties so four players feels like a must-have, despite the massive pain it causes.
I'm definitely happy I did a mock up because it has exposed all sorts of issues that probably would have ruined a full build.