Starwars control panel

[jlfreund]

My Wall-E cabinet is designed for easy access with slide out top and plexiglass, and a drop-in control panel that can be swapped out with alternate panels.   This Starwars panel is my first "alternate" panel that can be dropped in and connected with a single USB hub cable.

Wall-E: http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,147586.msg1536976.html#msg1536976

Building the triangular mount for the yoke was more challenging than I expected just using hand tools and a sander, but I was able to get a pretty good fit, and also design it to follow the "easy access" principle by mounting the yoke to a faceplate that rests on dowels. 

The photos should do a pretty good job explaining the build...

As a retrospective

Things that went well:
* Panel looks good -- very easy to swap out, everything fits snugly
* Yoke is working great.  It was a struggle at first, since mame.ini default values for joystick_deadzone + saturation need to be changed to 0.0 and 1.0 (which took time to discover, with no clues in the alan-1 instructions), but after that, the yoke feels perfect in Starwars.
* IPAC2 is working very well, which says something for me, since I've had problems with cheap encoders from Amazon (see below) as well as Minipacs before.

Things that did not go well:
* First set of cheap joysticks and encoders from Amazon were really bad.  Had to throw them out and start over with an IPAC2 + Happ competitions, forcing me to take everything apart and re-wire (http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,164393.msg1731543.html#msg1731543)
* Though I'm happy with the Happ sticks, I noticed one of the diagonals on one of the sticks is a little hard to hit (in Robotron).  Not sure if there's anything that can be done to tune the actuator on that stick?
* Another problem with my starwars game (Mame 160, running on Win8 PC, starwars set 1) is that the samples stutter.  Not sure if it's the ROM, my old Mame160 version, or my low end 4 year old PC.