Sorry if you know this already: If you get it wrong and can't be bothered physically turning the tube, or can't for some reason, you can always flip the 2-pin horizontal yoke connector around 180 degrees. This will also flip the image on the horz (long) axis. If your yoke connector has both horz and vertical stuck together (4 pins), like many are, then you would need to cut it in the middle (2 sets of 2 pins) to perform this trick. Obviously switch TV off before doing this. I've done it many times with no incident.
As always, my advice and suggestions are given freely, thoughtfully and with great care, but unfortunately no responsibility if it screws up
I was aware that these things can be played with (although I would be guessing about which to swap still) and I am afraid to even try!
At this point I have inadvertantly fried so many components on things trying to learn that I am taking a break for a bit on experimenting.
LoL @ mounting the tube the right way first time. I almost never get it right first time.
Like a coin toss- except somehow I won this time!
And that's ok, because when I mounted the joystick in this thing tonight I got that 180 degrees wrong the first shot, so... yeah.
Since I had gotten so far anyway somehow this week I figured why not stay up too late again and work on this some more.
Getting the control panel stuff sorted at first seemed pretty daunting as I have never dealt with mounting real leaf switch buttons before and this is also a first with a 49-way stick.
To make things more interesting, the place I actually found a legit assortment of proper color Sinistar leaf switch buttons happened to be out of pal nuts.
My local Ace Hardware had some coarse thread jam nuts that turned out to be the right fit (and costing $1 more each than a regular pal nut I'm sure) but what the hell.
And this is all more what the hell will I do because the only buttons I could find the proper translucent blue, orange, and red happen to be the short shank ones.
So as I am working with wood here it required some treatment with the router to get a cavity that I can get away with mounting these and making them functional.
Also entertainingly, the Williams 49-way has this donut on the top of the mounting plate that is 1-3/4" diameter.
Not only does that let you stuff the joystick assembly into a panel without having to remove the ball/shaft first but the donut also happens to be 3/4" tall and so sits flush with a plywood panel when mounted.
Had no idea.
I sat for a while with my eyes starting to cross while building a harness that could go from 49-way joystick to Jrok header (using parts of other harnesses I had around since I am too impatient to wait for the rest of the new molex bits I ordered to come) but wound up with what looked like it would work.
That is of course as long as I hadn't flipped the wiring over the wrong way (because the diagrams I could find of the two ends were shown opposite directions just for added fun-)
So after drilling, routing, crimping, heat shrinking, zip tying, etc. to see if I could get a test panel of something close to original arrangement and see if the whole mess actually works, we get...
And holy crap it actually plays.
And I am reminded decades later now just how much I SUCK at Sinistar.
But it's still fun.
And there is SO much unnecessary wire in a full prebuilt jamma harness for this machine that I can't stand the idea of all this crap in here, so I will be building a harness from a blank I got to sort this mess out and tidy up.
See how long that takes.