Question about 4 player control panel and coin door.

[Dekieon]

Hi, I would like to make a 4 player mame machine, and have been looking over the designes from others. I have some questions about this....

1) Why do people have 7 buttons for player 1 and 2, but only 4 buttons for player 3 and 4?

2) Most people have only 1 track ball in the center, or one spinner in the center. wouldn't i need 1 of each? Or does the track ball work comfortably as a spinner?

3) Wood or metal sheet for a CP? I am guessing a metal sheet if i am going to have a trackball, otherwise it would be sitting below the CP's surface. Any good places to get metal for a CP? what is a good metal for a CP? Aluminum? Tin?

4) I would like to have the 4 players colour coded like Gauntlet had. I would like to have the coin door lights colour coded with the same colours. I am looking at this door for my cab....http://www.happ.com/coindoors/40094600.htm.  The eject buttons are all a yellowish colour, can these be replaced with Green/Red/Blue so that I can have them match the players colours. If so where can I find replacements of different colours.

I think that is all the questions I have. Please any help on this is appreciated.

[Ian]

Hi, I would like to make a 4 player mame machine, and have been looking over the designes from others. I have some questions about this....

1) Why do people have 7 buttons for player 1 and 2, but only 4 buttons for player 3 and 4?

2) Most people have only 1 track ball in the center, or one spinner in the center. wouldn't i need 1 of each? Or does the track ball work comfortably as a spinner?

3) Wood or metal sheet for a CP? I am guessing a metal sheet if i am going to have a trackball, otherwise it would be sitting below the CP's surface. Any good places to get metal for a CP? what is a good metal for a CP? Aluminum? Tin?

4) I would like to have the 4 players colour coded like Gauntlet had. I would like to have the coin door lights colour coded with the same colours. I am looking at this door for my cab....http://www.happ.com/coindoors/40094600.htm.  The eject buttons are all a yellowish colour, can these be replaced with Green/Red/Blue so that I can have them match the players colours. If so where can I find replacements of different colours.

I think that is all the questions I have. Please any help on this is appreciated.

Well I can help a bit...

1) Player 1 and 2 get seven buttons for a couple reasons, they are your two primary players, so you need to make sure they are configured to play in the majority of games, which includes Fighters... Why seven? Well you get the six for the Capcom/Street fighter set up, and you add one more so you have 4 in a row for SNK/NeoGeo games like Samurai Showdown.

Player 3 and 4 have less, usually 3 or 4 because Im not sure about you, but I only know 4 player arcade games that only had 2 maybe 3 buttons. Not too many 4 player 6 button games out there, now if you wanted to emulate something like PS2 or Nintendo64 maybe you would want more.. but strictly speaking arcade you should only need 3 or 4 buttons for player 3 and 4. Plus you don't want your control panel too crowded...

2) Personally a trackball fails miserable as a spinner, but that is again just my opinion. I have a trackball on my 4 player panel now, but am adding a turbo twist 2 later....

3) Well as far as wood versus metal, I have a wood cabinet and it works wonders, and was easy to work with.. It can be done either way, and is really personal preference...

4) I don't have a coin door, nor do I want to mess with one... so someone else should probably respond to this... good luck.

[abzman2000]

I'm fairly certain those coin door plastic pieces can be replaced with at least red plastic.  on a side note it would be interesting to haxe someone mold them and cast them as clear (the leds provide the color), or any color you want. 

[Dekieon]

thanks for the great answers that is very helpful

I found that Happ makes coin reject buttons in all the colours that I need them in, so works out fine for me.

I have been playing with mame, to figure out a couple things when it comes to building the machine. I am having problems figureing out the coin door thing......

If i put credits in with 5 or 6 (coin slot 1 and coin slot 2) it adds credits, but it if I put coins into with 7 or 8 (coin slot 3 and coin slot 4) then nothing happens when it is a two player game, such as pacman. this is a problem as I want a 4 slot coin door so that games like Gauntlet can be rigged up properly. I don't want to have to remember to only use certain coin slots for certain games. Is there anyway around this?

[Ginsu Victim]

Rig it up to where all the coin mechs go to coin 1 by default. Most games work this way. Any games that distinguish between each coin slot, just set them up in MAME for that game only to use the needed mechs.
There aren't that many to set up. Plus, a game that never had three or four players will not work with mech 3 or 4 because it was never intended to. Just bypass it the way I said.

(I really mangled the English language there....)

[Franco B]

Red, blue, yellow, green and amber reject buttons for happ doors are > here.

(For some reason the red isnt listed with the others but the item number is 42-0517-00D)

Edit: D'oh! Looks like you found the rejects already

[Crowquill]

I'm guessing you're building this from scratch? For a 4-player panel I'd definitely stick with wood. Most standard original cabinets had metal control panels. The biggest exception to this rule is 4-player cabinets. I don't know of a single 4-player cabinet that had a metal CP.  The wood will be easier to work with and be sturdier in a large piece. I'd stick to plywood or MDF (which my Sega 4-player Spiderman cabinet uses)

As for mounting the trackball, you'll need a mounting plate to attach the trackball to. Then you cut out the shape of the actual trackball housing and router out the shape of the plate so that it's recessed level with the top of the wood. Lots more info and pictures in THIS THREAD.

Setting up the coin switches can be very confusing as the behavior in MAME replicates how the original cabinet was set up.  I spent about half an hour trying to figure out why my second coin slot wasn't working. It turned out that Joust only recognizes one coin slot. On your 4-player cab I'd set up the two left slots to register as player 1 and the two right as player 2 for a general setting. You can then specify slots 3 and 4 to work properly in games that support them.

[Dekieon]

I am going to use Gauntlet as an example so there is no confusion....What I don't understand is, if I wired it up like that, and I put a quarter into slot 4, I would think that I would get health added to the Valkyrie (player 2), instead of the Elf player 4. Am I wrong?

EDIT: Ok, I think I figured out a way to do this properly, unfortunately, it can be a real pain in the butt to do it this way. This is my idea.... in the settings go into Input (This Game) set coin door 1 to 5 and 7, and coin door 2 to 6 and 8. this way it will put in a credit no matter which coin slot it used. and 4 player games that relay on specific coin doors for different players like Gauntlet still would work correctly. problem with this method is that there are soooooooo many 1 and 2 player games, that if you are going to have 1000's of roms you have alot of work ahead of you. I tried to set it up like that in Input (General), but it doesn't register the coins when 7 and 8 are pressed doing it that way.

[NickG]

I think you were on the right track.  In fact, I have tested it here and it works. ( I set up the coin 1 to 5-and-7, and the coin 2 to 6-and-8 in [general], then I set the 5,6,7,8 to player specific slots in [this game] for gauntlet as per example. If it does not work for you, it is possible that you have a [This Game] config overriding your [general] config.
  The problem (not really a problem to me  ) this does not solve is that you still have to remember which coin slot to use for player-specific two-player games.  Rather, which two of the four possible coin slots will add credit to your player in such games. 
  If I had a 4 slot coin door I would probably look into controlled lighting as an indicator of which slot to use.