have you ever played an tron arcade standup for any lenght of time? seems like you have little idea about the way it feels or is constructed.
Im pretty sure that you have a hacked pc trackball on your cab. that pretty much says it all about how much you really care about game control. In no way can you play even half as good with a pc trackball than with a real arcade version.
WOW. I knew things would eventually get nasty and personal. It always does whenever someone challenges your "expert opinion" for more than 2 posts in a row.
FYI, the PC trackball I am using is one of the better ones I've tried. The spin on it is exactly the same as that on my Imperial (with metal bearings and metal rollers). The Crayola is a 3" trackball and actually has a very good throw and a very arcade-like feel, but of course I did mod the encoder wheels a bit to get it there. But it just shows that a cheap $20 trackball, with a few small design changes, can be up to snuff with an arcade trackball. Throw in some metal rollers and bearings, and you would add maybe $10 to the price and have a damn decent trackball.
Would I replace the Crayola with a good arcade trackball? Sure. That was the whole point of getting the Imperial. Its steel rollers will have a much longer life than the plastic rollers on steel pins in the Crayola. It also would take exactly the same real estate under the CP as my Crayola mount. The only real reason I haven't installed the Imperial is that I've given up on making any further mods to my "first draft" cab, and I'm moving on wholeheartedly to the production version.
How this all relates to the Tron stick is this: I would love to be able to use a genuine Tron stick (including base) on my cabs. But there are 2 major problems:
1) they are not made any more (not exactly like the original anyway) and so inclusion of those controls would depend on whether I could find NOS ones on Ebay, which could hold up orders, and most surely would require some refurbishing. I am not planning to use ANY used components on my cabs.
2) There is no way in hell that the guts of an original Tron stick will fit inside one of my rotating CPs, without a major redesign of them, which would either mean throwing the panels off their quite comfortable 15
oangle, or making the cab much deeper and the CP assembly much larger (and heavier). This means some sort of compromise is needed. My solution would be a reinforced Competition, with heavier springs and a custom-machined metal shaft for the handles to mount on.
Let me explain one more thing about the Tron sticks on my cab in particular: They really weren't put there to exactly duplicate the experience of playing Tron, but actually they are there to play Battlezone. I just like the look of the Tron sticks better, as they are more "classic arcade" than the Happs grip assemblies, the Virtua-On type grips, or other options I may have used. I will be trying to acquire a genuine Tron stick to study, and whatever solution I come up with for my own design, I will attempt to at least approximate the feel of the original.
Now... you could say it like this... If you knew you were going into battle in a forign land and had to choose which weapons to carry ... would you choose the cheap knock off weapons and take your chances? or would you take the ones that were PROOVEN, DURRABLE, DEPENDABLE, more ACCURATE???
It's interesting you chose this analogy. Many people will tell you that the most reliable sidearm is a good old service revolver. How can this be? An automatic holds twice or thrice the number of bullets, is much more expensive, and has a lot more engineering put into it. But its complexity is its own downfall. It has many more moving parts to get gummed up, or lost during cleaning, and it is more prone to jamming. The revolver is based on a much older, simpler design, but continues to out-perform many of the most state-of-the-art weapons. Again, sometimes the simplest design is the best.
however... if you never played with a top racket, youd never know what your missing. youd be content with crappy performance. in fact.. maybe you only have a small passing interest in tennis at all... and dont care if you get your butt whooped in a few minutes of play.
Another interesting analogy. Any athlete or artist will tell you it's the talent, not the tools. Venus Williams with a ratty old wooden racket strung with catgut would still beat the bejeezus out of the average schlub with the latest carbon-fiber super sleek model with synthetic strings.
You could say the same with arcade games. Some will tell you that nothing beats original hardware, in an original cab, with an original leaf balltop. But if you put your average player on an original Pac-Man cab with a leaf stick, against the top Pac-Man player in the world on a Mame-based machine with a microswtich 4-way, who's going to win? The winner is the one who knows the game best. It doesn't matter that the hardware is slightly different. Otherwise, none of the guys at work who are playing my microswitch-based controls would be able to get anywhere in the games, because the sticks are SOOOO different from what they used to play.
Anyway, I'll put this to rest now before someone locks this thread down. It's really not worth arguing about further--either my idea will work, or it won't. I'm not here to say that my way is the only way, or that it will definitely work, but it's possible and I'm going to give it a try. But then, I'm used to taking on your challenges Xiaou2. I seem to remember being told a couple years ago that a smaller rotating setup couldn't be done, because you made yours with the minimum inside space for all the controls to fit. Also, according to you it wouldn't be able to fit seamlessly inside a standard-sized cab, because there would be no room for some kind of complex latching system or home-made disc-braking setup that was absolutley necessary to lock it all down...but in the end a simpler solution WAS possible!
/rant
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Topic: Want to build (or buy) a Tron stick... (Read 6308 times)
