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Question about wiring 3 sided cocktail cab?
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xtravbx:
Well I'm currently in the process of building a 3 sided cocktail arcade. The middle section will feature 2 sidebyside players. The sides will have a standard controller setup on either side, such as something like this



So what do people do with the opposing end players?

Are they wired up on an IPAC2 with the same side by side controllers? And you just use those for flip games? Or do people wire those in as 3/4 players?

I'm building mine like that, but I guess I don't understand what people use the opposing ends for, and what player I would wire them in as. Would I use a 4 player Ipac? 2 player? Im kinda lost. Thanks!
Franco B:
You have a similar 3-sided setup as I have on my cocktail. You have a few options depending on what type of joysticks you are using.

Judging by your model you will have 52 microswitches/leafs that need to be connected If you are using 4/8way joysticks and buttons.

You can wire each microswitch to a separate input or you can 'double up' some of the controls like the left horizontal joystick + vertical joystick on the left hand side, left horizontal buttons + vertical buttons on the left hand side etc. If you did the same for the right hand side that would give you approx 26 inputs required and you could use the IPAC2 FS32.

If you want to wire each input independently you would need an IPAC4.

If you wanted to use the U360s you could get away with out using a separate encoder at all if you could get away with hooking up eight buttons to each U360.

You could also just hack some cheap USB game pads. If you wanted to use U360s and wanted to wire 9 buttons to each player you could hack one USB game pad for the extra four buttons if you are dead set on six buttons and three admin buttons per player.

What I would suggest is to reduce the number of buttons to the vertical CPs to two or three. There are not many vertical playable games that require more than three buttons.

If you were then to use U360s you could connect the extra four admin buttons to the spare inputs of the vertical U360s.

Personally I'm using 4/8way joys and an IPAC4 purely because I have one left over from another build. I would still use an IPAC4 in your situation just to keep things simple in a sense and stop an issues with buttons being pressed on the CPs not being used (think (big)kids stood round the machine at a party).

No matter what solution you choose you can map the buttons in MAME etc so everything works ok.

 





CheffoJeffo:
My first cab was a 3-sided cocktail (a design that I still love -- 4-ways on the verticals and 8-ways on the horizontal) and I wired up both sets of Player 1 controls to the Player 1 inputs on the IPac and same thing with the Player 2 inputs. It works fine, except when somebody grabs the "other" set of controls. This mostly happened when the kids were smaller, but still happens now when they want to annoy each other.

I entertained putting in a "kill switch" on each CP to just cut the common ground, thus deactivating the CP in question, but it hasn't been a big enough issue for me to worry about.

If I had it all to do again and had an IPac4 lying around (wait a minute, I do have an IPac4 lying around!), I would probably do something along the lines of what Franco B suggests and wire the P1 and P2 controls to the horizontal side and the P3 and P4 controls to the vertical sides, although it would take some time to reconfigure the inputs for the verticals. Since I spent the time configuring the verticals to set dips for cocktail mode, etc, it's not a lot more work.
Turnarcades:
I've been wanting to build a 3-sided cab for myself, though I'm more curious about how you get on setting up the games/software to rotate as you see fit. These are the three things that got me stuck when I thought about it:

Do you have a front-end that runs in vertical mode or does it boot in horizontal?
Do you have to sit at the horizontal controls to read the list and then move once you've launched it?
How do you get the games to flip for 2-players in MAME vertical games if it is not supported?
CheffoJeffo:

--- Quote from: Turnarcades on February 12, 2009, 07:35:34 am ---Do you have a front-end that runs in vertical mode or does it boot in horizontal?
Do you have to sit at the horizontal controls to read the list and then move once you've launched it?
How do you get the games to flip for 2-players in MAME vertical games if it is not supported?

--- End quote ---

Responding based on what I did at the time.

Horizontal (MAMEWah).
Yes.
I don't.
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