All of this is not directed at Patrickl...only the parts where I'm not rambling
Why do people insist that the current stick on it is "european". When was there ever a cabinet manufacturer from europe?
During the "hayday" of arcades, many games were convertable. Swap a marquee, change out the controls (or not
) slap in a couple of boards and start collecting more quarters. To say that there was nothing particularly special about the cabinets these went into is an understatement. They were very generic and pretty much used controls that were available without going half-way across the world to get them.
These cabinets were made *everywhere*
And BTW, these sticks are made in Belgium. Were they kicked out if the EU recently?
I have never seen a stick with a tapered shaft in europe anywhere! Maybe it's a UK thing or something? I have to admit, I have not been there much, but when I was there they had the same US/Japanese cabinets that I saw in the rest of europe.
Just out of curiousity, how old are you and when were you there last? I lived in Germany from 1983 to 1987 and that was pretty much the
only thing I saw. Seeing an arcade machine that wasn't designed to be converted (or a knock-off) was a rare thing in the small arcades I frequented (and there were plenty!), probably outnumbered by a factor of 3 to 1.
And I remember these sticks well. After being weened on the WICO red-tops (I had one controlling my Colecovision in the home-made "cabinet" I built when I was 16, which was 22 years ago), the European sticks seemed a little strange at first. But after a couple of games I soon learned to appreciate the shorter throw (but not too short) and very precise control they offered.
<Fast forward about 5 years>
My WICO Red-top (and my Amiga 1000) gets built into a newly aquired, gutted Defender cabinet. A while after that, the WICO gives up the fight and I never bothered to fix it up. I was bored with the limited number of games the Amiga offered anyway, so time for the basement.
<Fast forward about 15 years>
WICO since went through some financial woes and stopped making those red-ball sticks. The industry focussed on producing novelties, drivers and fighters, which aren't especially well suited to the short shafts and slippery knobs of days gone past and now, pretty much all you see are the bat-shaped sticks in the arcades. The bat-shaped sticks, by the way, are also of European descent, designed and produced in a factory in Spain.
<About 3 years ago>
Advances in PC hardware and emulation technology allow for much more than a handful of real arcade games to be accurately executed, with some actual commercial products becoming available.
So I become more interested in the virtually discarded cabinet collecting all manner of evil-crud (tm) in my basement. Do a little research, hack some controls, buy some bat-top sticks and join the fun. After which, much to my chagrin, I find out that whatever skillz I had as a player magically evaporated in the last 20 years. Strongly suspecting that *I* wasn't the only thing that was decrepit in the situation, I start looking for ways to improve my setup.
<Today>
The Bat-tops are tossed, along with the keyboard/gamepad/mouse hacks, replaced by a KeyWiz and OMNI-Stiks. I'm happy to report that the problem mentioned earlier had only a small portion to do with my "rustiness" at the controls, and much to do with the hardware I was using.
The WICO Red-balls are "officially" rare, and leaf switches are sought after by only the die-hard purists (and maybe some others who have never endured the cleaning or re-bending of contacts when problems arise). People everywhere are building their own cabinets and playing "nostalgia era" 4-way games with 8-way Spanish joysticks with the little disc floating around on the top of the panels instead of underneath a laminated surface as was intended, all the while talking about "authenticity".
Heck, I'm european myself and I want a repro stick to look like the stick on the games I played. So, that's a steel shaft with a ball on top. Apparently that's "japanese style", but I don't care where it's from.
Actually that's "japanese style" today. WICO made these popular sticks right from the beginning, as well as a "bat" design that looks quite different from today's sticks. And as far as I know, WICO has always been an American company.
There are quite a few "ball-top" sticks being manufactured out there today, each having varying levels of performance/durability. All you have to do is go into any game store and you will see one perched on a PS2 "arcade" panel. But you probably don't want that one in your machine. Looks are important, but not at the expense of performance (unless you built your machine primarily for display purposes
) Also remember that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and while some might not like the way they look, it doesn't appear to be a common view. I'm already close to a re-order
Actually, I'm hoping to find a 4 way leaf stick. I have a J-Stik now, but I don't like the clicking sound.
Turn up the volume
RandyT
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