Need Advice Hooking up a World Series Baseball Control Panel to a PC

[drwho2000]

Hi!  I am new to these forums and also new to arcade control building.  I am very interested in taking a World Series Baseball control panel and hooking it up to a PC for usage with MAME.  I've read one or two threads on the subject and did some preliminary digging and have some specific questions.

1.  I was looking into connecting the pair of leland spring joysticks from the control panel to an AKI 3.0 interface.  Is this a good way to go?  Or is there another product out there that would be a better choice?  This seems like the clean way to connect analog controls to the PC via USB.

2.  I noticed the leland joysticks in the control panel have a molex connector.  Sorry for this newbie question but how to I connect this to the wire terminals on the AKI 3.0?  Do I strip them and use some Radio Shack wire to redo the connections or is there a neater solution?

If there are any "gotchas" I might be missing please let me know. Thank you in advance for your advice!  Please let me know if I am headed in the right direction.  I can't wait to play this game with the arcade controls.

[Justin Z]

I used an AKI to connect a Quarterback control panel to my PC for MAME and it worked flawlessly.  Yes, I cut off the molex connectors and stripped the wires back a bit to make the connection.  I'm sure there *is* a neater solution but it worked fine and unless you ever plan on putting the control panel back into a real machine, you won't need the connectors anyway.

[u_rebelscum]

!. AKI is a great solution.  There are others, too (u-hid for example), but no huge reason not to go AKI for your case.

2. You can go to (maybe) radio shack or a higher end electronic store, and get the opposite gender molex connector, and run the bare wires direct from that.  Great if you want to use the sticks on a real cab (or the option to), but actually a little messier IMO than cutting off the molex and wiring direct to the AKI.

3. The one gotcha is that the springsticks do not start centered, and some games, including in mame, can have interfered inputs with this.  You'll either have to unmap the joystick from games that use a normal stick, or disable joysticks, or make sure the aki is joystick 5 and up (or 3+ for two player games, or wire the springsticks to the upper 4 axes (IOW, not to X or Y axis) and remap in mame.

[wp34]

drwho2000:

Would you mind posting some pics of your control panel?  I've been wanted to build one like it and cannot find any decent pictures.  I'm also curious if the spring-loaded joystick is centered or not?  I can't seem to remember.

[drwho2000]

I'm just acquiring it now.  When I receive it,  I'll post some pics.  I don't think they are centered.  They start all the way at the minimum position and you pull them back and then let them go to play.  A poster just above mentioned that this can interefere with some mame games and how to work around it.

drwho2000:

Would you mind posting some pics of your control panel?  I've been wanted to build one like it and cannot find any decent pictures.  I'm also curious if the spring-loaded joystick is centered or not?  I can't seem to remember.