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Yet another control panel critique

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leapinlew:

dead center or your whole cabinet will explode.

vorghagen:

Explode huh? Well, I don't want that happening. Guess it's going dead centre.

Green Giant:

1.  Have you tried playing with that setup, smashing the buttons for a while, yet?  The so called ergonomic design is not quite as nice as it sounds in most peoples heads.  So try it out and see if you prefer that or straight 6 buttons. 

2.  You might think of adding a 7th button on player 1 &2.  This is done for neogeo games that use the bottom 4 buttons. 

3.  You will probably want to bring down those player buttons closer to the controls.  Then on the top of the panel you can fill in some of that real estate with admin buttons, namely exit and pause.

4.  If you want to maintain the look of a true panel without the coin buttons, just place them on the bottom of the control panel.  It will no doubt have plenty of room underneath for some buttons.  Did it on mine and it looks great, plus it gives me the option of disabling them with a switch forcing my friends to shell out some cash.

javeryh:

My $.02:

1.  I like that you are going for an ergonomic button layout but I've found that it's way more comfortable using the attached layout instead of keeping the middle button raised.

2.  If you add a trackball make sure that one of the joysticks isn't in the way

3.  I'm not sure what the dimensions are of that thing but it looks HUGE.  I'm not a fan of 4P panels but a lot of people are so I won't go into that but yours seems much bigger than a lot of the other ones I've seen.

4.  I also think you should scrap buttons 5 and 6 on P3 and P4 as well as not angle the joysticks

5.  Are you going to be using the 4/8 way switchable Omni-stiks?  I'm not a big fan of the visible mounting plate but I guess you could work around it if you notch the CPO for the lever... seems like a pain though.  I prefer a dedicated 4-way on there somewhere or something that is switchable like the t-stik or better yet the ultimarc 360 that you can map to do whatever you want.  I've found that most people who play on my cabinets don't grasp the concept of switching from 4-way to 8-way for more accurate controls - they just want it to work properly.  This is why I LOVE the ultimarc 360 - it makes the different control setups a non-issue.

6.  Spinner?

It's good that you are doing a cardboard mock-up to get a feel for things...  Good luck!!   :cheers:

Shattered:

A little more food for thought; Will you really use the four player setup?   

I had a four player setup for almost three months and used it once.  I found that I used the two player setup the most even when I had four or five friends over.   When two were playing the others were chilling, drinking, watching some vids etc.. 

What I did was remove player 3 and 4, move the player 1 and 2 a bit further and installed the trackball and spinner in the center.   This gave me more shoulder room around the panel as some of my friends are in the 350+ lbs range.   As was already mentioned the spinner and trackball opened up more games.   

As for the 6 buttons on p3 and p4, how many games use those?  If you're going to keep them, I would second or third the opinion to lower the button count.   



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