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Advice:  Never Curve a Button Layout

1)  Most everyones keyboard keys are in a straight line, and your fingers remain bent, to get better leverage to press them

2)  Everyones finger lengths are different,  so even if you had the finger strength to press a button from a completely flat-hand finger spread...
each person that tried to fit your layout with their handshape... might have alignment issues... where their fingers dont fit your layout.

3)  I can only assume that the Japanese cabinets can partially get away with this,  because they use Flat or convex buttons, with low-activation force switches.
I personally still cant fathom how anyone can use a flat hand to press these buttons for any extended period of time.  You have far less leverage force, and it
would be incredibly fatiguing, even with low activation force switches.

 I also prefer the US standard Concave buttons.  The shape funnels your fingers into the center of the button, and helps prevent your fingers
from easily sliding out of them.   Its also much more Comfy.

4) As Badmouth said..  Its too easy to Lose track of which buttons that your fingers are on / over.  You might accidentally also press the side edges of a button,
due to misalignment.  With a Straight Layout, your fingers are always in-line with all of the buttons, no matter what size/shape your hand/fingers are.

While there are some Ergonomic Keyboards with a curve... they tend to be a very shallow curve, and your fingers remain bent while operating them.
With these large sized arcade buttons, the spacing is too large... so the curve becomes much too steep.

The amount of space you might save from curved layouts, is very Minimal at best,  and really isnt worth the control issues.


 The only exception, is a lower-thumb button...  like the Run button in MK3.   Since its only a single button that isnt pressed often, it works fine as
something you can quickly reach for, with an extended thumb.


 The only other thing Id personally do, with a button layout.. is to have at least One, Classic Leafswitch button.
These are excellent for Rapidfire shooters, as they are much less fatiguing for high-speed repeat-firing games  (like Halley's Comet).


 If you only have 4 buttons,  a diamond shape isnt that bad... but honestly, Id still always stick to a  2x2  straight line.
Diagonal button layouts are only really good for Gamepads, because you can roll your thumb on them like a d-pad.
Even then... I still preferred the Genesis straight line button layout.

 Large arcade buttons are different, because you cant easily switch from horizontal resting, to the top and bottom buttons.
When the buttons are in two straight line rows,  its easily to slide both fingers from one set of buttons, to the other set.

Here's another possible option; Ultimarc offers an LED controller for addressable LED strips that is supported by LEDBlinky; https://www.ultimarc.com/output/led-and-output-controllers/nano-led/

Thanks for that! That was the first controller I looked at. Unfortunately I'll be managing at least 50 RGB bulbs (more if I add strip cabinet lighting) which would require 3 Nanos (if I'm reading the documentation correctly). That's $66 vs $2 (for hundreds of bulbs) for the controllers. I'm also using WLED to talk to my home automation (Home Assistant over WiFi) to allow it to also control the lighting based on its triggers. I'm pretty determined to try to get WLED to work with LEDBlinky if it's remotely possible. If you have any hints on how I might approach it that would be greatly appreciated. If I do write an intermediary broker I will try to make it configurable in case others want to go down this path. Thanks so much!

Start working on a dashboard over the weekend.  Used some 2020 aluminum extrusion I had from other project (3D printer build), printed some brackets, and added some hardboard  So far so good.  Also made the speaker panels, which have the 4" speakers pointing downward at a 45 degree angle.  This is a departure from the original Daytona cabinets, but I'm happy with it. 

I've been working on my twin cabinet alignment issues as well.   I noticed that the with the 'heads' aligned and bolted together with the marquee topper, the bases were in a "V" shape, with about 1" difference.  So I made a solid steel brace for the rear of the bases to lock them together, and now I need to realign the heads.  Player 1 is now 'tweaked' a little.   Not sure how I want to fix that yet.  But I have to tear everything apart, so I figure its time to cut the t-molding too. 

I solved this problem by building two two-player cabinets, then linking them together for four player games. 

Four adults on a single cabinet is cramped (unless you build the Castle Crashers Behemoth Cabinet https://www.ign.com/articles/2011/03/12/pax-castle-crashers-battleblock-theater-arcade-cabinets-rock) and the button layouts are always some kind of comprise.

Some are speculating that Nvidia will become one of the biggest companies in the world, due to AI.  Personally, I have my doubts.

judged by the hardware i saw on the last LTT video i saw, (as grating as he is) it could very well be...



sems nvidia has shifted its focus a bit... which is why perhaps the development of their gpus have kind of stalled. coughcoughtiversiononly10percentbettercoughcough

I did a Neo Geo themed cab so wanted the Neo Geo four in a row on top.  It is somewhat similar to what you have there.
After actually using it for a while, I much prefer to use my thumb to hit the first button in the second row instead of using my pinky to hit the one on the end of the top row.
Enough so that I set up all games to allow either, but I personally never use my pinky anymore.

As you say, except for console games there are very few that use more than 4 buttons.  IIRC, in MAME only the Dungeon's and Dragon's games and a couple others use four.  The rest only use 3.
Outside of MAME Guilty Gear Isuka uses five, but it's probably the weakest in the series.

So as far as layout with only four buttons, I'd ditch the pinky button and second one in the bottom row.
(hitting the leftmost/lowest buttons with my thumb and rightmost button with my third finger)
I like this better than the simple diamond or square.  IIRC on Tekken this makes your middle two fingers the left and right arms and outer fingers your left and right legs.

I've come to dislike the curved ergonomic layout with modern convex buttons for P1 & P2.  On games that use more than 3 buttons I find myself losing track of where the buttons are and looking down to reset my hands more often.  It may be less of a problem with concave buttons.  If I had it to do over again I'd do the standard boring "straight six" streetfighter layout with concave buttons.
For P3 & P4 on a four player cab I'd do the same "straight six", but with the last two buttons on the bottom row omitted.

Also (for P1&2)keep in mind that the default MAME layout is the street fighter straight six.
123
456

If you wire the buttons as:
1234
567

You will end up having to remap a lot more of the games than if you had wired them as:
1237
456

ok. I have setup operation wolf with mamehooker from Launchbox without using RL..  Shouldn't be too difficult since you have the ini files for the other games already figured out.

Sweet! I used gStAv’s (JB/GUN4IR Discord) Excel spreadsheet  as a guide to keep track of which games I have hooked to MH…for reference.  I did dive into the list and made my own spreadsheet, which I’ll post shortly after I’m done with it.

Off topic, but this is where I ramble anyway so I'll post it here. 

I got tired of fighting my Retro Duo, which is a clone NES/SNES.  When it works, it works, but I've had to open it and reinforce the PCBs, replace most of the internal wiring, reflow the power jack.  Just on and on.  Recently I was thinking, "remember when Zelda games were actually fun and you weren't boiling mushrooms and slugs all day?" and tried to play Link to the Past.

Well, $30 and 72 hours later, I had a Super Famicom in hand.  99% of my SNES gaming is off an Everdrive clone in a universal shell, so it didn't really matter to me.  However, I do have about six or so original games that I bought in the 90s and I like to play them occasionally.  I'm not really a fan of shell mods... this system made it a good 30 years before I got my hands on it, I'm not widening the cartridge slot.

Other option is to play the games as loose PCBs.  No.

Another option is an adapter.  They're $20 on Amazon but they're really meant to make Super Famicom games work on SNES for people too squeamish to snap off two hidden plastic pegs.  They'll work the other way, but you've got to chop up or remove the shell it's in.  Why they didn't make a universal design is beyond me.

Another option is to use a Game Genie I already had.  Again, you have to strip it loose or cut the shell to hell and back.  But I popped out the board and took a look at it.  Held it up to a Super Famicom shell.

$4.60 and 4 days later, some random crap game was delivered in a huge box on Memorial Day from Japan.

With enough cutting of the internals of the shell, using the soldering iron to burn away enough of the top to get the slot exposed... the damn thing actually fits.  (Again, why didn't they use a universal shell??)



Then it turns out the Revision 1 Game Genies do not work with hi-rom games.  Game will boot and immediately freeze.  The solution is to remove 6 470 Ohm resistors and replace them with 100 Ohm per some NESDEV thread.  I had 4 100 ohms, 1 120 ohm, and 3 of the 470s were twisted together in parallel to make ~150 ohms.  Close enough.





 

I think I found it.  It looks like it would work but you'd have to make some kind of adapter to reroute the pins.  The 27C160s are about 75-80 cents each in bulk, so I'll let you make that determination as to "is it worth it."

 

I originally posted this as its own topic but it looks like this is the better spot for it. Sorry for the spamming!

LEDBinky and WLED

Hi all,

I'm hoping to find a way to use LEDBinky to control addressable LEDs connected to WLED. I've done quite a bit of searching and haven't found anything yet. Addressable bulbs on WLED have a couple of big advantages: incredibly cheap controllers (a few dollars) and VERY simple wiring.

My hope is to get the two talking to each other but their JSON APIs are different. At this point I'm imagining writing a server/mediator that sits in the middle and translates/maps messages going in each direction. Before I start doing anything like this I'm hoping someone can suggest an easier approach. My preference would be finding some way to configure LEDBlinky's JSON Output to speak to WLED's API but I don't see any way to configure it.

Here's another possible option; Ultimarc offers an LED controller for addressable LED strips that is supported by LEDBlinky; https://www.ultimarc.com/output/led-and-output-controllers/nano-led/