Buttons

[booms70]

i am wondering how many buttons are required to run most games. I'm looking at building a cabinet but need to know roughly how many buttons are required for both single and multiplayer

[Lyle_JP]

By my count you need 7 per player. 6 action buttons plus one 1P/2P button per joystick (perhaps another button for a coin-slot if you don't plan to have a real one). That will cover your Capcom fight games, and virtually everything else. Most games use only 2 or 3 buttons. I'm hard-pressed to think of any games that use more than 6.

[booms70]

Thanks so much. I'm putting it together for a school project and need to keep costs low so don't want any unnecessary buttons.

[caver01]

@booms70 I think you owe it to yourself and your project to define your requirements next. In other words, think about what games you WANT to play now that you know there is a wide range.

For example, let's say you want to play arcade games. You could make a decision that you are building a retro arcade system with the intention of playing classics from the 1980's. You could do very well with just a joystick and two buttons. You mention multiplayer, but in my example, most games would switch back and forth with each player using the same controls. PacMan for instance uses just a joystick and no buttons! Donkey Kong only needs a jump button.

Keep in mind that most people don't count "Player 1 Start" button, or "2 Players Start" button when counting controls. Most folks think of these as given, but you will need to budget for them if you are building an arcade system. Also, most cabinets have dedicated buttons to drop virtual coins (and these double as SELECT for home console emulators). This is another button you need to consider.

On the other hand, if you absolutely must have Street Fighter, your minimum requirement would be 2 joysticks, 12 action buttons (6 each player) one or two COIN buttons and a Player 1 Start and Player 2 start. Think of the games you want (or need) and work your way down from there.

If you can't think of popular titles off the top of your head, you can search google for most popular games lists and make your own list of the ones you know. Then, search those titles with the words "control panel" to see images of the originals. You will quickly come to some conclusions based on your budget what you will need.

A final consideration is Admin buttons. Some folks use dedicated buttons for things like EXIT. This can be very handy, but you can work around it if you have the START and SELECT (COIN) which by default are setup as a hotkey combination for exit. I would think you need at mimimum, two buttons to even navigate in and out of the menus, plus Start and Select (coin).

[booms70]

Thanks for your help! I'm very new to this and wanted a project that could combine woodworking skills (cabinet) and electronics in one. I'm mostly focused on 'arcade' style games as opposed to street fighter. So I'm working out the buttons required for that now. Thanks for the information, as I was never alive in the 80's I didn't know that most only had one player controls. Its great to see such a helpful community and I'm really enjoying being part of it and checking out others builds.

[caver01]

@booms70 I hope you will come back with another post about your progress with photos. It's aways cool to see build projects.

Regarding multiple player controls--for arcade systems, about the only time you need multiple controls is when you have two players playing together at the same time. That's why arcade games like Street Fighter are a good reference, but that one is on the high end of button requirements. Older games like 1941 have two players side-by-side for co-operative gameplay. Each needs two action buttons for shots and special weapons.

A benefit for two sets of controls if you can afford it is that you can setup the emulator to use both joysticks for one player when required. For example Robotron 2048 uses two sticks--one to move and the other to fire. Same with Cloak & Dagger and Krull.

For the cabinet, have you decided on the style? Arcade systems usually came in three forms: 1. The typical stand-up cabinet, 2. the Bartop style which is basically the top half of #1, and 3. Cocktail. The cocktail is an interesting design because it is flat, with controls on opposite ends or along one side (or both). Here's my project.

[booms70]

I have decided upon a cocktail style machine, and will be using the space at the bottom as storage as the electronics are minimal in terms of cabinet space. I will be posting back on this thread when I have build photos, etc. I'm just starting to order buttons now thanks to all your help.

[Lyle_JP]

@booms70 That's great! I love cocktail machines.

Of course, you'll be limited to games with a "cocktail" mode. Not every game will flip upside down for player 2. It also eliminates most co-operative or versus gaming, though there are a few exceptions (Space Invaders has a great 2 player for cocktail clone).

[caver01]

@Lyle_JP said in Buttons:

@booms70 That's great! I love cocktail machines.

Of course, you'll be limited to games with a "cocktail" mode. Not every game will flip upside down for player 2. It also eliminates most co-operative or versus gaming, though there are a few exceptions (Space Invaders has a great 2 player for cocktail clone).

That's not entirely true. You can play games that don't have cocktail mode--no problem. They just won't flip. You would have to share the controls on one end, but you certainly are not limited to ONLY games that have the option.

Also, depending on the actual control panel design, co-op games may be an option too. My cocktail setup has three panels--one on opposite ends of the screen vertically, and one along a horizontal long edge of the screen with two sets of controls. The longer, third panel allows side-by-side co-op play, fighters, and any horizontal game to be played fullscreen, while the two vertical panels are used in the more traditional cocktail P1 P2 flipping view--mostly classics. It's really a 4-player design, but I'd still consider it a cocktail cabinet for the fact that it is flat like a table and has controls on the ends. I find this setup to be the most versatile for screen use, and I can even play 4-player games like Gauntlet, or even SmashTV co-op using all four joysticks. In fact, even co-op vertical games are possible if you rotate the video to be played from the horizontal panel.

@booms70 What kind of panel setup are you going to build? 2-panel on the vertical ends? Or are you budgeting another panel along the horizontal like mine?

[Lyle_JP]

@caver01 That's a nice setup, but requires 4 sets of controls, which can be more cost prohibitive. By the way, how do you get the horizontal games to use one set of controls, and the verticals to use another? Did you just set up 4 controllers and handle the mappings per-game? Or do you use a different platform/emulator for one versus the other?

That's not entirely true. You can play games that don't have cocktail mode--no problem. They just won't flip. You would have to share the controls on one end, but you certainly are not limited to ONLY games that have the option.

Yes, quite right. Of course, only games explicitly setup for a one-joystick cabinet will work that way. Fortunately, that's a lot of them (particularly from the "golden era").

[caver01]

@Lyle_JP It's that golden era of games that makes this design so special in my opinion. People really get into the head-to-head gameplay nostalgia!

I hear you about the additional expense with the long third panel. This is why I think it is so important to figure out exactly what you want to play and what you are willing to sacrifice before you start designing. Getting your requirements and knowing the limitations of your build ahead of time is great because you always know that you are building a system to do X and not Y.

For my system, I had a few things going for me. First, I was recycling an old cabinet, so I already owned all of the joysticks and buttons. I also already had two spinners. Most important, however, was the fact that I wanted a system that could play 4 player Gauntlet. That was a high enough minimum that it pushed me into a 4-stick design. The only questions after that were how many buttons per player position. All I had to do is find the most demanding game that I wanted to play in each orientation. I don't know that I ever found a vertical game that uses all 4 buttons at those positions, so maybe I have more than I need there. The maximum on the horizontal for me was Street Fighter. So, that meant 6 buttons for each of these positions. Every other game I wanted fell inside those constraints and a few bonus games work very nice with the extra joysticks. I also wanted to play Off The Wall (Sente) and Blasteroids--each requires two spinners for head-to-head and co-op, so that's why I have two spinners. The trackball came later because I upgraded the size of my display and I had more room on the horizontal.

The rotation was initially controlled via AdvanceMAME's .rc config file which allows you to specify rotation for vertical games using the vertical/display_ror yes which covers all vertical games, but I had to add exceptions with config lines like 1941/display_ror no to undo the effect for games that I would rather play in letterbox format on the horizontal because of side-by-side co-op.

AdvanceMAME config was a great solution for a long time. I was using the PiPlay distro and finally switched to RetroPie. When I did that, I discovered the virtues of the Pi-CRT libretro shaders. At this point, I have per-rom retroarch configs to specify the rotation. I used to map keys in these files too, but I cleaned this up and just used the MAME GUI menu to remap the controls to the vertical sticks and buttons per game. Setup was tedious, but it works well. Now my retroarch configs frogger.zip.cfg for example only specify the rotation and the alternate shader (the vertical variant of Pi-CRT) and the controls are remapped in-game.

I'd say lr-mame2003 is what allowed me to switch away from AdvanceMAME. It looks and plays a lot better. However, I still use AdvanceMAME for vector games as it has superior rendering capabilities for vector games (it can match your display's native resolution).

[enlikil]

@caver01 heya there, you mentioned something about MRS PAC MAN and using player 3 and 4 for cocktail mode. How did you do that, I have all 4 controllers working now but I do not know where to specify player 3 and 4(vertical) when running cocktail mode games instead of players 1 and 2 (Horizontal ). I have been searching
But I can't find anything. Do you have a generic CFG that has the info in it you wouldn't mind sharing?
THanks

[caver01]

@enlikil It's easy. Inside lr-mame2003 you press <tab> and bring up the MAME GUI. select the menu to configure controls for "this game" and simply go through the controls one by one, mapping Player 1 commands using the player 3 controls on the vertical end. Same for player 2 on the opposite end for player 4 controls. Get it? You are just remapping everything for this game.

I need to connect a keyboard to do this so I can easily access the tab key, arrows for menu navigation, enter, etc., but when I choose a command to configure like Player 1 UP, I input the direction using the player 3 joystick. Same for all directions, buttons, coin and so on.

I wouldn't copy cfg files between games or systems. They may not work on other games, and mine probably wouldn't work for you as you may not have the same key mapping.

In any case, doing this is not hard, but it does take time to get it right for every vertical game. I think it's worth it for this unique cabinet design.

[enlikil]

@caver01 kool, i was able to get it working by adding somw lines to the rom.cfg for each game. I will try. Your way. It seems i have some latency with mrs pacman on my pi3.. im not sure i like my 8 directio . Joystick.. do you think its from the way i changed controllers configs?

[caver01]

@enlikil I don't know about your latency. That sucks. I will say, however, that it is much easier to build alternate controls remapped using the MAME GUI than per-rom retroarch CFG files because you can see what you need to adjust (some games will have have 1 button, two, none, etc.). Sure, copying a cfg and renaming it might be easier. Either way works. When we were discussing cfg above, I thought you were asking about a mame cfg which is a file you can't really edit that mame creates when you make an adjustment to a game inside the GUI.

As for the 8-way problem, yeah, you really run into issues with an 8-way stick on 4-way games. It doesn't really happen the same way with a D-pad on a hand-held controller, but the diagonals kill you on the classics with an 8-way arcade stick that should be a four. It's so bad that I want to try one of the more advanced sticks like the Ultimarc 360 or the servo stick. I just don't have any experience to know if they are worth the expense, so I deal with it by making my actuator a little harder to hit the diagonals--something you can adjust on my Happ Super by flipping the round plastic do-hickey around.

[enlikil]

I wonder if I should just purchase some 4 way controllers I don't think its a latency issue I think its just that Its 8 directions and like in pacman it gets difficult to go up or down when you go from one angle to another..

[caver01]

@enlikil I thought about installing 4-ways on the vertical ends as that would satisfy a lot of classics. My problem is that I have mutually exclusive controller needs. For example, if I did this, how could I play 4 player Gauntlet, or use all four sticks in two-player Smash TV? Without a switching joystick it's a compromise I guess.