Advice needed on dial Joysticks

[monkey puzzle]

I am new to arcade cabinet building and am just planning to build my first project. I was thinking about which joysticks to use and then thought I might as well get sticks with a rotary knob for playing such games as Ikari warriors, midnight resistance, forgotten worlds etc. Can anybody tell me how well these sticks work with mame?
After a quick search I found the rotary and optical joysticks at Happ controls: http://www.happcontrols.com/joysticks/rotary_optical_joy.htm could anybody tell me if either of these would be any good for what I want? I thought the rotary stick may be what I need but it says that it is 12 position. I remember playing Ikari warriors at the arcade and remember the character turning through only 8 postions. Therefore would I be correct in saying that 1 turn of the stick would not equal 1 turn of the player? And does this feel odd when playing or not?
I would appriciate any advice from anybody in the know, even if you tell me that rotary joysticks are not any good at all.

[Kremmit]

If you're after Ikari-type play, you don't want those Optical rotary sticks, you want the Mechanical Rotary sticks, the ones with the 12-position switch.  12 is the correct number of positions for Ikari and similar games. 

You can also buy LS-30 joysticks off ebay- they are the yellow octagon-topped sticks you remember from Ikari.  They also have a 12 position switch on the bottom.

Or, you can buy 49-way joysticks and fl0yd's rotary adapter, which couples a 12-way switch to the bottom of the 49-way joysticks.  This is the most versatile solution available right now.

All of these require two separate encoders to make them work.  They will all require a rotary joystick encoder, the only one currently on the market is the "Druin's Interface".  The first two will also need a keyboard encoder (I-Pac, KeyWiz), or Gamepad Encoder (GP-Wiz).  The last one will need a 49-way encoder (GP-Wiz49, SJC) instead.

(You can use the optical rotary stick you mentioned, but it will not feel like you remember, and it will be harder to make the character point exactly where you want, because those sticks do not "click" into position like the mechanical rotary sticks do.)

[Tiger-Heli]

Also, you can use MAME Analog Plus and use the sticks on some games without Druin's interface but using 16 inputs on your encoder for each joystick.

This provides the most authentic and accurate gameplay, but only works in about half the rotary games, and IKARI is not one of them (Time Soldiers is, though).

[monkey puzzle]

Thanks guys your help has been most helpfull and greatly appritiated!
The whole rotary joystick thing appears not as simple as I first thought. Ill consider it but I might just stick to regular joysticks for my first project.
Does anybody know if there is a simpler alternative to playing Ikari warriors without rotary sticks?


















1

[88mph]

Does anybody know if there is a simpler alternative to playing Ikari warriors without rotary sticks?

Get really good at playing the game only shooting straight ahead?     Ba-dump-dump

Seriously though, Druin's interface makes it really easy to set up a rotary joystick.  A rotary joystick has a rotary switch on the bottom, which opens and closes different switches based on where it is.  The leads from these switches go to Druin's interface, a small board powered by 5 volts.  It has inputs for all of the switches coming off the rotary on one side, and two button outputs on the other side (clockwise and counterclockwise).  You wire your LS-30 joystick to the switch inputs, and wire the cw anc ccw switch outputs to a normal keyboard encoder.  When you start turning the joystick, the interface board sees this, and then starts sending button press information to you keyboard encoder, which in turn starts turning your gun on the mame screen (turn clockwise, turn counter clockwise, etc).

It's all pretty straightforward.  What is complicated are all of the options available--you can go with LS-30s, optical 49 way joysticks with Floyd's rotary hack installed, etc.. 

If you wanted a really simple way of playing Ikari warriors, you COULD configure a few buttons on your control panel to do the clockwise and counter clockwise motions.  i.e. if you have a 6 button street fighter layout, make the first button rifle, the second button grenade, and then configure two more conveniently located buttons for turning.  It would be a frustrating arrangement, but you could probably limp through a game playing that way.  It probably wouldn't be enitrely unplayable. 

Don't get scared off from doing a rotary setup if that's what you want.  There is plenty of info online on how to set things up.  The hard work has already been done for you if you buy the interface.

Good luck,

88mph