PCCP reaches v0.1; GameFest 0.1 a Success!

So I got my new ball-top sticks for the Mag-Stick Plus on Saturday and got them installed. It's smaller than I was picturing - more along the size of what I remember for some of the 4-player cabs such as The Simpsons. I think I was picturing the Ms Pacman knobs which must have a larger diameter ball. I still think they look much more retro than the pear-shaped knobs that originally came with the Mag-Stick Plus's.

In the same shipment, I got my replacement microswitch for the one I broke installing the Mag-Stick Plus that one fateful night. Turns out I got 4 replacement switches for the price I thought was for one! Andy Warne at Ultimarc has certainly been nothing but helpful and I'll be sure to get all of the parts for Rich's cabinet through Ultimarc. So after a few quick minutes I had all the controls working on the Proof of Concept Control Panel (PCCP). This finally brought it up to release candidate version 0.1.

Wiring up the last of the buttons/joysticks, I approached things slightly differently than the first time around. Rather than cutting wires and splicing in extension wire in the center, I crimped on the quick-disconnectors and made use of the quick-disconnect splitters. This is SOOO much easier, and I wish I would have thought of it before starting the project - it would make for a far tidier looking bunch of wiring. I will definitely post a full Ultimarc-based wiring tutorial as soon as I get the time to take pics and post them here.

I also took advantage of one of Logan's naps by completely cleaning up my mess in the basement and moved a desk & end table around down there so that the controls were at waist height with the monitor up off the floor. It is *way* more ergonomic now, and gives me the first taste of what the cabinet could be like, though the height of the monitor is still too low.


In other news, I decided to celebrate the completion and cleanup by having several friends over. We had 5 friends in attendance for Game Fest 0.1. The controls performed admirably, with the only negative performance I could see being that 2P Double Dragon wasn't running at full speed through MAME (we didn't have NES working yet so couldn't test it there).

I did seem to have SNES working but it seems that i still need to work out the best way to get out of their games -- the current SNES emu I'm running has its own GUI that shows up after playing a game and hitting esc. Seems like the trackball works to get the game quit, but if possible, I want the same quit key (ESC) to work in every emulator.

Burns & Kilgour managed to get well beyond level 70 in Bubble Bobble (though most of us lost interest by then and wandered over to play some Blokus or just chat instead.


Sunday I got NES working and figured out some of my issues trying to set up a second MAME menu in MAMEWAh (so I could have one for Mame32.exe and a differnt one for mame.exe since the roms seem to run differently). I had forgotten I'd moved the roms out of the mame folder and into the mame32 folder (no wonder it said i had no games! there were none in the folder I had mapped!). Turns out that I still couldn't get the speedup hacked version of Ms. Pacman working, even in mame.exe. I have to wonder if the ROM got corrupted or something since it used to work back before I discovered mame32.exe ran most things better.


I also got a chance to play some Joust and made it up to Wave 7, which is probably a personal best. I was never the king of Joust or anything, but definitely count it among my favorites right now thanks to its simplicity, speed, and challenge. It looks pretty sweet in the digital bezel that mame32 displays, too.