Bemani controls

[b3atmania]

Hi,

In anticipation of future emulation of Beatmania and Pop'n Music I am making controlpanels for them.

I have all three official PlayStation Beatmania controllers from Japan. The turntables on the Konami ones (the Pro and IIDX one) are quite good but the buttons are not. They have too much travel, use rubber springback action and thus cannot register quick taps needed to perform the advanced songs.

Building Beatmania controls should not be that hard. It uses 5 pushbuttons (or 7 on the IIDX series) and a turntable. The turntable is just a spinner with a turntable instead of a knob. There needs to be some friction between the turntable and the panel as you don't want the turntable to act like a flyweight

[HINT]Oscar: how about offering turntable knobs? :: [/HINT]

Regarding the Beatmania pushbuttons: I noticed they are not like the pushbuttons you commonly find on slot and poker machines. Beatmania buttons have a really light touch and small travel unlike slotmachine buttons. I have attached a photo of a real Beatmania switch. Anyone know where to purchase these?

Also, I've been looking into making a control panel for the Pop'n Music series. They use some kind of huge dome pushbutton. I've found Happ parts and Wico parts that look like them. Are they similair in size and performance to what Konami uses on their panels?

[TheTick]

That looks identical to the square illuminated pushbuttons I received from the happs. The micoswitch on the bottom was white instead of black.

http://www.happcontrols.com/index.html?http://www.happcontrols.com/pushbuttons/954002xxxxz.htm!
http://www.happcontrols.com/index.html?http://www.happcontrols.com/pushbuttons/ilumn3.htm!

I bought two of the above red ones to act as coin buttons for my old panel I'm selling.

As for the difference in travel and touch... might be something as simple as a different spring.