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Please Review Control Panel Design - Suggestions or Improvements?

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shardian:

Get rid of those two buttons right below the spinner.

crpngdth2001:


--- Quote from: Arcades R Fun on March 15, 2007, 01:37:14 pm ---No disrespect to Knievel's design but  IMO there should not be a spinner in-line with the top of the trackball if you are a Golden Tee enthusiast. Other than that I do not see any issues.

After building several panels for customers that had the controls above the trackball, the feedback on the 4 way joystick and spinner location was unanimous. Those who liked to play Golden Tee said that it got in the way of their shot making.
Having never played Golden Tee before I had to test this out first hand. Well, I nearly broke my thumb on 1 hard drive!
So, we moved the 4 way stick out of the way. Then we test played the game with a SS spinner above the trackball. No hurt fingers but the palm got beat up! These issues were found to be a problem with all test players who tried to play Golden Tee.

We then immediately changed all our panel designs to eliminate these issues.

I can honestly say that I'm now hooked on Golden Tee! Still trying to break 50! ( yes, 18 holes)  :)





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Yea, I think I will avoid that setup for that very reason. I'm still debating swapping the spinner and 4 way, not sure about that.

On the mention of removing both buttons under the spinner, isn't it better to have dedicated buttons for the spinner much like the 4-way, or are they not needed? As you can tell, I don't really play spinner games, but wanted the option to.

RobotronNut:


--- Quote from: crpngdth2001 on March 15, 2007, 10:10:21 am ---Hmm, that is an interesting thought on putting the 4 way on the right so the player is "Centered" while playing. I will certainly play alot more 4-way games than spinner games. I need to ponder this one for a bit.

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if you're really into 4-way games, you might consider doing what i did: move the 4-way down to the lower row and center it. this allows you to play 4-way-in-left-hand games (dig-dug, donkey kong, punch-out, etc.) and 4-way-in-right-hand games (ms pacman, frogger, etc.). it also enabled me to support defender well. of course, you will end up with a wider panel if you do this.

click the link in my signature to see my layout. the web page includes a list of classes of games that you may want to account for.

btw, after testing many 4-ways, i now prefer the ultimarc J-stick = sanwa JLW but have not yet updated my web page to reflect that.

crpngdth2001:

Ok, final revision. Mocked it up and I like the layout. Attached is what I ended up going with. I will also have 2 buttons on each side of the CP for Pinball, and plan on building this fine plunger for the front:

http://www.johnsretroarcade.com/hardware_pinball.asp

Thanks everyone for your valuable input! Hopefully I'll get my first arcade project started off on the right foot.

Arcades R Fun:

Very nice final panel design! I went back to your original post and it's changed quite a bit. You could keep taking suggestions forever as there's no shortage of great ideas on this forum. But, looks like you are ready to cut!

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