MAME Controls Setup - Help Needed

[cv2065]

Hey all!  I'm wrapping up my revamp of my MAME arcade. I have an old Slik Stik Quad cabinet. Pretty cool as I got if for $400 a few years ago and haven't really seen anything like it. Anyhow, I'm redoing all of my buttons, adding a new joysticks, roller ball, spinner and flight stick. My joysticks and flight stick are the UltraStik 360's from Ultimarc. Seem to be pretty high quality pieces compared to the stock sticks. My 3" trackball and Turbo spinner are coming from Groovy Game Gear and arrive today.

My question is in regard to setup. I'm going to be hooking up the joystick buttons directly to the UltraStik 360 via harness. Each joystick can support/configure up to 8 buttons and then connects via USB to the computer. That leaves me with 21 buttons, as well as the trackball and Turbo spinner that I need to hook up. I'm dedicating 4 buttons to the Turbo Spinner, 4 buttons to the trackball, 4 buttons to Coin, 4 buttons to Player # (4 players), then I have 5 remaining buttons (1 Home, 2 Select, 2 Esc). I have an IPAC-4 laying around, but not sure if I can use that or not.

Any suggestions? Thanks!

[bobbyb13]

All of that isn't going into one control panel, is it?

[javeryh]

21 buttons not including 8 each for P1 and P2??  So 37(!!!) buttons on your CP?  You might want to rethink the whole thing.  Post some pics and people will be able to help.

[mahuti]

I'm dedicating 4 buttons to the Turbo Spinner, 4 buttons to the trackball,

You can definitely use the iPac4 with the u360s.

You can probably use 2 buttons on the spinner and 3 on trackball. The games you lose by not having 4 buttons each would probably be better played using the flight stick or they have completely unique controls. I know that's not 100% true for every single rom, but I don't think any of the generally accepted must-haves for either of those controls need more than what I mentioned.

If you're going to use the iPac4 anyway, you might wanna just route all the controls other than the u360s themselves through the iPac to make it easier to troubleshoot and configure later. No reason to have to configure and troubleshoot 3 encoders (I'm counting u360s as encoders) when you already have one encoder that can handle all of the buttons and inputs. Also, if just using the iPac, when wiring it all up, it'll make it easier to mentally track what control goes with what. Basically you'll have a lot of repetition in your buttons... button1, button2, button3, etc for each of the spinner, trackball and joystick can all be wired to the same inputs.