49-way Centering

[Brewser]

Hello,
I know this has been discussed before but I can't seem to find it. I just hooked up the Midway 49-way joysticks from Groovygamer and I have a problem with centering. If I push down and let go the object on the screen will keep moving down for little bit longer, it won't stop right away.
I thought I read you need to break these sticks in, but this can be frustrating because my ship keeps crashing into the ground if I don't push up.
Any thouhts?

[lustreking]

Use it.  They apparantly need to be "broken in".

-S

[Teknique]

That shouldn't be happening- make sure your in the right mode for the right game and you may need to configure it in the gmepad menu.

[Brewser]

It's strange and I don't think it is the mode. I went into the mame controller menu and used the joystick to scroll down the list. If I hold the joystick down for a second and let go the list will continue to scroll for another 4-5 lines before stopping.
It seems to go back to center in other directions.
I have been wiggling the joystick back and forth several times, sometimes it will stop and other times it won't.

[KenToad]

Hey Brewser,

  Yup, that's the famous slow centering grommet.  Your setup is completely normal.  Just invite some enthusiastic friends over to give your joys a workout.  I've had mine for a month now, haven't given them too much a workout and they have started to "break in" and center faster.  Also, they just generally feel nicer with time. 

  RandyT and some other veterans of the 49-way sticks have mentioned the "break in" period with these joysticks.  I talked about walking into the bomb blasts with Bomberman.  Certain games require faster centering than others.  I would go for some frantic fighters, maybe Midnight Resistance if you have the Rotary Adaptor.

  Hope that helps.  Search around some more if you want to see some more opinions.  There should be plenty to find.

Cheers,
KenToad

[Brewser]

Hey Brewser,

[markrvp]

KenToad:

Have you tried using the rubberbands underneath like 1up did?  This looks like it may help.  I'm going to try it as soon as I get a chance.

[Kremmit]

To improve playabillity until your centering grommets get broken in, you could increase the analog deadzone through the windows control panel.  Make the deadzone big enough, and the first level of sensitivity on the 49-way will be ignored. 

You'd have to put your GP49 into Raw49 mode, which would make 4-way games suck, but if you can find some 8-way games to play until the break-in period is over, you ought to be fine.

[Brewser]

I tried the rubber band hack and it didn't help much. I guess I will work on breaking them in. I have to wonder why these need to be broken in, in the first place? My son is really dissapointed and asked me why I switched the joysticks and I told him because these can do more, but he keeps crashing and gets upset.
It seems the problem on both of mine are moving the joystick up, it gets stuck. I know I said earlier that it was down, but I actually had to switch the connector to the right so I remapped everyting in Mame so really it is still up on the joystick. One joystick will go up for about a second and the other can get stuck going up for ever, you have to bump the joystick for it to center.

[Kremmit]

One joystick will go up for about a second and the other can get stuck going up for ever, you have to bump the joystick for it to center.

That sucks.  I just got a pair of Midway 49s in the mail- haven't hooked them up yet, but just wiggling the handle around, I can see how that could happen.  The grommet pulls the stick slowly, instead of snapping all the way back to center.  Also, when the stick's almost at the center point, the grommet's barely flexed at all, which means it's not pulling the stick very hard to go that last little bit.  If I wiggle my stick, it centers in one spot, but if I push it out and then let it come back in slow, I can see that the slider hasn't come quite all the way back to the point it rests in if I wiggle the stick.  I suspect that's partly due to the grommet's weak pull near the center, and partly due to the little bit of slop between the slider and the white plastic actuator.  In your case, the slider isn't moving quite far enough to keep from tripping the optics unless you bump the stick.

1UP was supposed to be getting some heavier-duty grommets for these sticks, for use with his Tron handles.  A heavier duty grommet should provide faster and more positive centering, at the cost of making it take a little more arm strength to move the handle.  You might message him and see if you can buy a set and see if they fix your problem.

In the meantime, try that deadzone thing.  If your son's playing an 8-way game, Raw49 mode will probably perform acceptably, and the deadzone will neutralize the optic that's hanging your stick up.

[Brewser]

Thanks for the advice, but how do you set the deadzone in windows control panel? I don't see where you can set this up. The only thing you can do is calibrate the sticks.
Thanks for your help.

[Kremmit]

Oops, my bad.  The deadzone setting isn't in the Windows control panel (at least there's not one there for my GP-Wiz49 running Windows XP).  It's in MAME.  In MAME 32, look under the "Options" menu, select "Default Game Options", click the "Controllers" tab, click "Enable Joystick Input", and set the "Analog Joystick Deadzone" slider.  You'll have to play with the setting a little bit. 

For other MAME builds, I guess it's done in the .ini or .cfg files- but I don't know jack about messing with those.

[Brewser]

Not really sure how the deadzone works in mame. Anyone have any ideas what the slider does and how it affects your joystick? Is this just for up and down movement? confusing.

[Kremmit]

Ok, remember that the GP-Wiz49 reports your 49-way joystick to the computer as an analog joystick. 

MAME's deadzone adjustment was designed for analog PC joysticks.  It tells the software to ignore any analog stick movement, in any direction, for a limited distance from exact center.  The farther you move the slider, the further from center you can move your analog stick without making your character move in the game.  That way, if you're using a really sensitive PC stick, and your arm twitches a little tiny bit off of dead center, you don't move accidentally.

Your GP49 has multiple modes:  Raw49, Scaled49, 8-way, 4-way, 4-way Diag, 2-way Vert, 2-way Horiz, and 16-way.  In any of the 8, 4, 2, and 16-way modes, the GP49 will always report to the PC as an analog joystick pushed all the way to the edge of it's travel.  Therefore, in any of those modes, the deadzone setting will not do a darn thing, since the PC only ignores joystick presses that are near the center point. 

However, in raw49 and Scaled49, the GP-49 takes advantage of your 49-way joystick's ability to report how far from center it's been moved, and will report to the PC as an analog stick that's only moved partway.  That allows MAME's deadzone setting to come into play.  If the stick is barely moved away from center (like yours are when they fail to center up all the way), then MAME will ignore it- and your son doesn't crash and die.  The downside to this is that you lose the fancy 2, 4, 8 & 16 way modes, and 4-way games especially will suffer from not being played in the 4-way mode.  8-way games may not be quite as good as they are in 8-way mode, but still ought to be pretty playable.  Doing this is not meant to be a permanent solution- it's just until your grommets get "broken in", or you try out the stronger grommets I mentioned, or you figure out some other solution to get your sticks centering better.

Hope that helps!

-Kremmit

[KenToad]

KenToad:

Have you tried using the rubberbands underneath like 1up did?  This looks like it may help.  I'm going to try it as soon as I get a chance.

I haven't tried it, but I feel that my sticks aren't really giving me centering problems at the moment as I've continued my ... um, testing.

If you try it, I want to know how well you think it works.

Nice deadzone description, btw, Kremmit.

Cheers,
KenToad

[Brewser]

My player 1 joystick is getting better. I played games for about 2 hours yesterday and it doesn't seem as bad as it was. They are a little different feel than the Happs competition and it is taking a little longer to get used to them. Playing Scramble really is a challenge now and I used to do pretty well before in the game.

[Kremmit]

Did you happen to read [urlhttp://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,39232.msg356374.html#msg356374]this post[/url]? 

He says that lubricating the sliders on his 49-way with lithium grease seemed to help his centering, and by extention, his 4-way game play.  Give it a try- can't hurt, might help!

Lithium grease is easy to find at any decent size auto parts store.

[Brewser]

I just went and bought some Lithium Grease and it didn't help. You can see when you let go of the joystick it will slowly move back to center when you push up. The other directions seem to be working fine. My player one stick seems to be just about there, but player 2 will need some heavy play I think.
I don't know why it has to be this way, but I guess it is.

[Kremmit]

That's weird, that it moves slow when returning from the "up" direction, but not from the others.  I was under the impression that it was slow in all directions, and that "up" just happened to be the one that doesn't quite make it all the way back to center.  Makes me wonder what makes "up" so special.

You might try opening your stick up and rotating the grommet 90 degrees- then see if "up" is still your problem direction.  If it is, then the grommet isn't your issue.

[Timoe]

I think I'll start selling 49way joysticks "broken in" for about $120 each.  YEah they'll be more expensive but I'll have "played" with em already and taken them through those rough spots so they work right out o' tha box fer ya!

[Brewser]

OK Fella's I am still having the centering problems with both joysticks, but I found a way out of this.
For me the problem is when I push the joystick up and hold for a couple seconds then release. It seems to get stuck one notch above center and then after a couple seconds it will release to center. You can view this in your windows control panel.
So what I did is go through windows calibration and when it says to hit next with the joystick in the middle I would push the joystick to the top and hold it and then release. Once I released the joystick I would hit next. You have to do this twice.
Now they center perfectly everytime. I couldn't play games like scramble before and after I did this the game works flawlesly, no more letting go of the joystick and have it crash into the top. Once you let go of the joystick it will center and not move the ship around.
Now I am very happy.

[RandyT]

Brewser,

Did you purchase the stick from me?  Something definitely seems odd with your setup, as this break-in issue should be nowhere near as bad as all that.

If this is happening in 8-way DRS mode, something is definitely hanging up somewhere as the dead zone is larger in 8-way than 4-way.

Is there anything peculiar about your installation that might be different than others?

RandyT

[Brewser]

Randy,
Yes I bought 2 from you about 2 weeks ago. I don't think there is anything different in my setup than anyone else.
My player 1 joystick I had to install upsidedown since the connector on the left wouldn't fit in my CP. I use mame to reverse the stick. The player 2 joystick is setup with the connector on the left. Both joysticks have the centering issue when holding the joystick to the top. In this case my player 1 has the issue when holding the joystick down since it is reversed.
When you look at the bottom of the stick you will see when releasing from holding the stick to the up position it bounces to almost center then you can see it slow down until it hits dead center. When I run the sticks in Windows control panel you can see the stick almost hit center and pause for a couple seconds then go to dead center. My player 2 stick can get stuck sometimes in the up position and needs to tap the stick for it to center.
As I mentioned in the previous post I was able to compensate for the sticks by changing the centering in windows control panel and now they seem to work great in mame.

[RandyT]

Did you calibrate the sticks before you started seeing these problems?   I ask because calibration shouldn't be necessary.

Also, the first tier of movement should be showing "center" in the 8-way DRS mode.  If your sticks are far enough to be registering in the second tier, then something is definitely wrong with your setup.  I just measured .150" of stick displacement before it showed being off center in 8-way DRS mode.  Is this how far off you are "sticking"?

You might want to take this to email so we can explore other possible problems.

RandyT

[Brewser]

Randy,
Let me play around with these a little more. I noticed I was not using the gpwiz software before playing the games. I didn't have the batch file setup properly in Mamewah. I will try these games again without using windows control panel and only gpwiz and get back to you if the problem persists.
Thanks for your help on this.

[Brewser]

Randy,
I have been playing with the sticks after using GPWiz and everything seems to be working great now. Centering doesn't seem to be a problem any more.
The only problem I have now is the dust cover sometimes clicks when it hits the edge of the joystick hole. I had to cut out a 1.5" hole. Do you make a larger dust cover?
Thanks again for your help.

[Timoe]

I put my hands on a NFL Blitz cabinet today.  Man! I hope my sticks dont get that sloppy.

The sticks seemed REALLY low and you'd tap it and it would flop all over the place.  They were severely broken in.

The bat handles were a real glossy black though so I'm not sure they're the same ones we're getting from RandyT.