Two pinball button or not two pinball button?

[pietdummie]

Hi,

I am currently designing my cabinet and thought I would add two buttons - one to the left and one to the right of the cabinet - to use when playing a pinball game.

My question: are there even pinball games out there that allow the use of these additional buttons or should I have these buttons in parallel with 2 of the existing buttons?

My (not yet used) control set is this one, each USB controller has got 12 Button Slots but only 10 buttons, can someone confirm I can connect two additional buttons to the controller.

Thanks!

[Lolonois]

From what is advertised the kit should work.
If the "Zero-Delay" encoders (can not judge if they are genuine or clones) put you off (e.g. being not so zero-delay) you can also run your setup with two MCP23017 (GPIO extender) and via GPIO.

If I would build your setup I would provide the left/right flipper a dedicated pin.
With the kit, as well as with MCP23017 you have 16 switches. Usually 4 are needed for the stick axes, and 9 for the most common push button functions: A, B, X, Y, TL, TR, Select, Start, Hotkey. So you have in any case three spare switches.

The third could be "Tilt" triggered by a gyroscopic sensor. (sometimes Space-key on keyboard based pinball games)

Mapping of the buttons can be done on a per game basis for many emulators -out-of-the-box- (retroarch-based and amiberry). And for any other emulator this can be done via runcommand-onstart.sh / runcommand-end.sh [1] in combination for example with xboxdrv.

Sorry, a lot to digest for a new joiner. But no worries, I assume you will master it by time.

TL;DR: Two separate pins/inputs for the flippers.

Happy making.

[1] https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Runcommand/#runcommand-scripts