Top fire joystick for midway cocktail

[paigeoliver]

Ok, childrens. I am not usually one for purchasing new joysticks, so I am not totally up on what is available. So I am asking here.

I recently received a nice Gorf cocktail mame cabinet in a trade. I am very happy with it, except for one problem. It only has one button per player.

I cannot, will not, and am not going to drill holes in the perfect original overlays to add a second button, so that means I am going to have to resort to swapping out the sticks for top fire ones.

So does anybody know of a good top fire 8-way that

#1 (this is a must) is sized correctly to actually be usuable in a Midway cocktail.

#2 (this is also a must) has a good feel.

#3 (fat chance) has the Midway bolt pattern (not the Wico/Happ one). This is not that important because there is already an adaptor plate available to fit the newer sticks to the old Midway panels.

So, can anybody tell me what model stick I am looking for, and who sells it?

[mushmouth]

What about the little red trigger stick they used in the cocktail Tron units? I would think that'd be perfect and I've seen at least two of them in the last two months on ebay. That's what I'd use.

[MinerAl]

I think this is a real void in our hobby.  We need one of our controls making friends (Andy, OSCAR, SS-Christian, RandyT, ?) to make a button-top that isn't awful.  The choices available from Happs look much more like claw-machine controls than arcade joysticks.  

I would immediately order a (reasonably priced) replacement stick, or entire assembly with a decent button top.  

To me a decent button top would be basically a ball top or modern bat shaped stick (not the skinny bats from happs) with either a button centered in the middle of the top (like the Wico "Command Control" ball/button tops for the Atari 2600) or the little base-of-the-front-of-the-ball trigger like the Tron coctail sticks.

I just think the market would be huge for such a product.  

To un-hijack the thread:  Paige: look into a Tron cocktail stick or a Wico leaf 8-way and find a Command Control ball/button top in the 2600 hardware on ebay which (I understand) is a drop in button-top replacement for the wico stick (see stolen e-bay pic below).

[paigeoliver]

I already have one bat top command control, but it looks like it might be too tall to be used in that application.

[MinerAl]

Even taking into account the extra height that will be lost with the adaptor from midway to wico?

Is there room in there for a spacer (hunk of MDF) ?

I have some Gorf cocktail CPs (oddly enough), and some wico 4-ways, I can check it out myself.

Something I thought of when I was going to use these CPs was the idea of finding another player 1 CP that had the two little buttons for selecting 1 or 2 players.  So I'd have two extra buttons on the cab.  The real player one CP select 1 player button would stay the 1 player button while the select 2 players button on that CP could be used for something else.  The player two CP's select 1 player button would be the new select 2 players button, and the other player select button could be used for something else.

That makes sense in my head...  The idea is to get an extra button without maiming the CPO.  It might be hard to use a big normal button and a little player select button at the same time though.

It would also allow you to have player 1 sit at either end of the cocktail table.

Anyway, I still say one of our fabricators needs to address this problem.  (If only I had the tools and contacts!)

[paigeoliver]

Oh wow, I was not aware that command control handles were a drop in on the old Wico bases. I will check that out, if so then I MIGHT have a solution, as my bat top command control seems a bit taller than that balltop one in the picture.

[bigmoe]

Oh wow, I was not aware that command control handles were a drop in on the old Wico bases. I will check that out, if so then I MIGHT have a solution, as my bat top command control seems a bit taller than that balltop one in the picture.

I'm also interested in your results!  Thanks!