rotary joysticks

[Silverwind]

Rotary Joysticks...

1) What games use them besides Ikari?

2) Are they worth getting?

3) Take the happ optical rotary... is it a happ super with rotary.. or happ 360 with rotary?

4) Any other rotary comments? Do you own one? How do you like it?

[Tiger-Heli]

Rotary Joysticks...
1) What games use them besides Ikari?

Heavy barrel, Ikari III, Victory Road, Caliber .50, Search and Rescue (?), Bermuda Triangle, Top Gunner (Bootleg), lots of SNK games (soccer one), others?  (Could be used for Tron, but not arcade accurate)

2) Are they worth getting?

If you like any of the games above, they're difficult to play otherwise.

3) Take the happ optical rotary... is it a happ super with rotary.. or happ 360 with rotary?

Happ Super, with a spinner encoder wheel on the bottom.

4) Any other rotary comments? Do you own one? How do you like it?

I don't own one, but I have a pseudo-summary of the various options here:

http://www.fraggersxtreme.com/arcadepanels/faq.htm#The Rotary Joysticks you mention are not available yet and I want to play IKARI! What should I do?

(Scroll down near the end if the link won't take you to the exact question)

[m3talslug]

Give Forgotten Worlds a go and you'll understand the need for a rotary joystick.

[Silverwind]

ahh yes forgotton worlds is a good one.. i've only played the genesis version though...

thanks for the FAQ.. good read..

[m3talslug]

heh the Genesis version is not the same .  You don't need a rotary joystick for that one.  Give it a shot on MAME using a mouse to control the rotary and the LEFT button to fire.

ahh yes forgotton worlds is a good one.. i've only played the genesis version though...

thanks for the FAQ.. good read..

[1UP]

Does anyone know if using a spinner and a trigger-grip joystick (i.e. Tron style setup) would work well for these games?

[MKL]

A rotary stick for Forgotten Worlds is not the best option however (yes, I tried)... the actual game uses a special spinner that can be pressed to fire, similarly to Discs of Tron (but without the pull part).
I was lucky enough to win a FW control panel on ebay a while back so I got two of those spinners but they're really hard to come by...To me the best alternative is a normal spinner for gun rotation and a pedal button for fire (note that the game has autofire)...or a top button stick+normal spinner...

[Tiger-Heli]

Does anyone know if using a spinner and a trigger-grip joystick (i.e. Tron style setup) would work well for these games?

Can it be done?  Sure!, but I think you would lose too much of the original feel of the game (for those of us who remember the original games).

IKARI was meant to be played with a twist of the right wrist to change fire direction, while hammering the shot button with the left fingers.  You could physically play the game with a trigger-stick and a spinner, but I think it would feel more like the light tower in Tron than IKARI.

Another minor gripe is that in IKARI, you knew that one click of the stick moved the shot 45 degrees, which you will only get with a mechanical rotary joystick, not a spinner or the Happ opticals, FWIW.

[m3talslug]

while we're on the topic, does anyone know where I can get a precompiled mame with MC-Escher's code for rotary sticks?

[jerryjanis]

Don't forget Xybots (I think that it used a different joystick than the rotating ones - I think you would just rotary-click once to the right or the left and then it would return to the center again but it basically works the same).

When I found out that you could use the original SNK LS-30 Ikari Warriors joysticks (the clicking rotary joysticks), I was all bent out of shape with excitement.  I created a control panel and put those joysticks into it along with Druin's interface.

I was using the rotary joysticks for my main panel, but it turned out that the joysticks really sucked for Street Fighter II, or really any other game that required a non-rotary joystick (one solution to this might be to use the more expensive Happs version of the rotary joystick).

The other problem that I ran into is that even with Druin's interface, the controls were still kinda flawed.  Mame treats those controls as analog devices, when really they were digital (12 position rotary or something).  You could never get the analog settings perfectly right so that maybe 1 in 10 rotary clicks wouldn't register in Ikari Warriors.  (Somebody at some point on this message board hacked some of the Mame drivers so that you could build mame yourself to process the controls perfectly...  I have them somewhere if anyone needs them).

Lastly, after playing Ikari Warriors seemingly endlessly, I felt kinda let down.  It's one of those Mame games that was pretty fun as a kid to pop in your only quarter and see how far you could get, but if you have unlimited quarters then there's really no fun in it at all (if you ask me).

So finally, I basically scrapped the whole thing.  It's all sitting in the attic collecting dust (utill I can set up my cabinet to use rotating control panels, I guess.)

CONCLUSION:
------------------
Using the SNK LS-30 joysticks with Mame involves a lot of work and a decent amount of money (Perhaps $100.00 for the joysticks and Druin's interface).  The end product is only useful for a handful of games that I, personally, wouldn't call "worth it".  Even then, (unless you use special, modified drivers and build Mame yourself) the controls are not quite 'arcade accurate'.

Using the Happs version of the joystick may make it possible to use the rotary joysticks perfectly for all the 8-way Mame games so that the one panel could be useful for most games, rotary or not.

By all means, if you have a cabinet with a swappable control panel, and you have a 4-player, Discs of Tron, Spinner, 4-way joystick, Defender, and a Steering Wheel control panel, then something is definetly missing:  The rotary joystick panel.  But as far as priorities go, I wouldn't put the Ikari Warriors panel higher than any of the rest of these panels.

[1UP]

Does anyone know if using a spinner and a trigger-grip joystick (i.e. Tron style setup) would work well for these games?

Can it be done?  Sure!, but I think you would lose too much of the original feel of the game (for those of us who remember the original games).

IKARI was meant to be played with a twist of the right wrist to change fire direction, while hammering the shot button with the left fingers.  You could physically play the game with a trigger-stick and a spinner, but I think it would feel more like the light tower in Tron than IKARI.

Another minor gripe is that in IKARI, you knew that one click of the stick moved the shot 45 degrees, which you will only get with a mechanical rotary joystick, not a spinner or the Happ opticals, FWIW.

Cool, well, I never actually played Ikari when I was a kid, none of the arcades I frequented had it.  Never even saw it until I was like 20, and I don't think the controls were in good repair, so I lost interest after one quarter.  I think I have it in my cab, so I'll have to try it on my Tron CP...  At this point, I'm not really interested in hacking any more specialized controls, so if it's possible to play on what I have, I'll go with that.  720 is pretty playable with my setup...