Please review my CP design

[steveh]

I am putting together a 4 player arcade machine.  the 2 center controllers, are u360's  the outside controllers are 8 way happs. 

what admin buttons do i really need?  i figure exit game, pause, Save game(do i need this for mame, i guess i could use it for other emulators tho. )  what else do i need?

i am tying to keep the setup as non bulky as possible.  I figure ill add a spinner at some point probably above player 2, but thats a future upgrade.

[Green Giant]

So far it looks good for the most part.  Are those player buttons about the setup, what about coin buttons?

You might want to rethink the shape of the panel.  It looks like a wing right now.  You may want to curve the front and pull down the trackball and player 1&2 controls.  This will give some space between the trackball and monitor for games like golden tee, and it will define some difference in player 1&2 and player 3&4.  Take a look at all the examples.  There are some good examples of 4player panels and some really bad examples.

[unclet]

I curved my 4-player control panel a bit in the front.  This allowed for more room for the trackball as well as allowing me to add a 4-way joystick on top there.  The curves also allowed me to put pinball buttons on the sides for me to play Visual Pinball games.

[jcoleman]

Since ravamping a 4-player CP (from a Blitz conversion that was born as Capt. America & The Avengers), I have been a fan of angling the 3rd and 4th player sticks/buttons toward center.  Mine are toed in 30 degrees.  If you assume that the players will move more around the end of the CP rather than stand in front (there's really not room on a 39-inch panel to do so), 25-30 degrees makes a lot of sense.  My advices (as usual) is to build a mockup and have 3 friends crowd around it with you.

Coleman

[steveh]

THX uncle.  I think i might go with your route.  do you have dimensions of the cp so i can try to mask the size and see how it works for me?   I like the idea of having the pinball buttons.  I put them on my 2 player mockup, but never even thought about it on the 4 player setup.  and that is something i want to be able to do.

I have a 4'X2' peice of mdf i am using for the cp. 

also what extra buttons should i have for admin buttons.

I dont want to angle the joysticks i would like the ability to play 2 player smash tv, and other games with similar control's  but angeling the buttons is not a bad idea.

[unclet]

Here is a picture which shows the buttons I have on top of my control panel along with the measurements

[steveh]

cool.. what is the mame/nintento/snes buttons for?  also what are the tab tilda and enter for?
whats the difference between the esc and reset buttons?  what is the pull spring back?
is your panel truly 56" wide?  i  need to keep mine at 48.  do you find the extra 7th button useful?

do you find after you have built it any thing you would change, or things you are specifically happy about?

[Green Giant]

cool.. what is the mame/nintento/snes buttons for?  also what are the tab tilda and enter for?
whats the difference between the esc and reset buttons?  what is the pull spring back?
is your panel truly 56" wide?  i  need to keep mine at 48.  do you find the extra 7th button useful?

do you find after you have built it any thing you would change, or things you are specifically happy about?

I am pretty sure the mame/nintendo/snes switch between those different emulators.  This is not necessary anymore since there are very clever ways to navigate through a frontend, and you can include far more emulators.

Tab, tilde, and enter are the admin buttons.  I forget what tilde is for, tab will enter the mame menu to make any changes you need.  I just mapped mine to hitting all four pinball buttons at the same time.  So far no one has done this while playing a mame game.

Esc exits any game or emulator you are playing.  Reset just resets the game.  Reset is not really necessary but a dedicated esc is.  The pullback spring is to give it a more realistic feel on pinball.  You can easily assign any player button to pull back the spring on pinball emulators.

The 7th button is really nice to have for neogeo games.  Also on emulators it can be nice to have another button down there.  Typically people place the 7th button down and to the left of the general street fighter layout, but that is just preference.

I can probably speak for unclet about changing his design when I say don't place anything above your trackball.  Leave a nice empty space above for any golf/bowling games so you don't break a finger.

[unclet]

Green Giant:
Thanks for the summary .. you did a good job explaining.   I have been working like crazy lately so I can not check these boards as often as I would like to .....

A couple of things though .....

The tilde button I believe allows to adjust the volume through Mame ... I really do not use this button. 

Having seven buttons are nice for me so I can play other emulators and PC games easier.  It is always nice to be able to map extra buttons for these things.

As for the joystick over the trackball thing ..... yeah, some people do not want to have a joystick near the top of the trackball so they can really flip the trackball for playing golf and other games.  Never really has been a problem for me.

Just as "Green Giant" indicated ...... the "emulator buttons" I added were used before frontends were "big".   I use the Hagstrom KE72 encoder which allows multiple keypresses to be assigned to one button press.   This was real handy before frontends were used a lot since I could simply press one button, which would execute a BAT file I had, which would load another emulator and remap the control panel accordingly.  Pressing the MAME emulator button would reconfigure it back to Mame settings.  It was nice, but no longer required for this purpose since I now use MALA as a frontend and it performs all the emulator switching for me.

The "Reset" button gets a lot of usage in my house since the kids play on the cabinet a lot and once they get frustrated with a game, then simply press "reset" to start over instead of having to wait until the game is over naturally.

Things I wish I did:

I wish I put a volume knob on my cabinet instead of having to change volume levels through windows.  This is really not a hugh issue since me being lazy still out weighs the desire to rectify this "problem"   

Based on the pictures at my site (http://unclet.arcadecontrols.com/) you can not see that I replaced the Player2 joystick with a Gorf-like trigger joystick which has one thumb button and one trigger button.   I actually hacked the joystick handle to a Happ Super joystick base.  Since the mounting holes for the Happ Super were already drilled, I needed to mount the trigger joystick to them.    Anyway, I would think about getting a trigger joystick if money allows ..... it is good for Tron.  Also good for some PC games.