Posted by Druin on 15, 2001 at 2:46 AM:
In Reply to: Rotary Vs. Optical Joysticks posted by Magnet Eye on 14, 2001 at 10:48 PM:
In an attempt to not give a biased outlook, here's a bunch of pro's and con's I've gathered over the past year from my own experience, and from those that have reported back to me regarding rotary hardware.
What I have heard back regarding optical vs mechanical rotary...is people say the optical ones of course can work for the normal 12 position Ikari type games when you set the response speed in MAME, so that rotating the optical stick makes the guy rotate at a reasonable rate, but they say it just doesn't feel the same as the definite click-into-position that they know from the arcade. Things like turning too far, finding it hard to get a steady rotation because of the mouse sensitivity issues...one person said they sometimes had to keep spinning back and forth just to lock onto a certain firing direction. Just for a test I loaded Ikari in EMU+ and used the mouse to rotate the character and I can see potential for it being hard to control, though I haven't ever touched an optical joystick so I don't know how those feel in comparison.
So this might just come down to that same old pushbutton and 8way joystick dilemma...horizontal or vertical switches, leaf or microswitch, matter of preference, and as was recently stated here regarding those ultimate joysticks, although most people say they suck, maybe they're good for certain types of games afterall.
You might not know what you prefer until you try both, which isn't a reasonable thing to do, buying both kinds of joysticks and the interfaces required just to see how it feels to you, but if you do know these games from the arcade, as I do, the whole reason I created that interface was to get to use the authentic yellow rotating joysticks, and the nostalgia is great.
Costwise, I hear that Videoconnection now sells the original yellow LS30's for $9.99 again, not the jacked up price they did for a while...so if you are going on cost analysis, assuming you already have the IPac optical hardware and just need an optical joystick from Happs, it's around $39 I think? And if you went with the mechanical joysticks, you could maybe get the LS30's instead of the Happs mechanical ones, and combined with a Rotary Interface and the $9.99 LS30's if they're obtainable for that at videoconnection, you'd pay about roughly $70 to get 2 mechanical joysticks and an interface, or if you bought 2 of the opticals alone from Happs, it would be around $80 plus the optical interface if you don't have it already...so the cost factor in that case balances roughly out assuming you have the IPac optical interface right now.
If you wanted to buy specifically the Happs mechanical rotary instead of an authentic yellow low cost rotary, then it's more expensive since the Happs sticks are around $35 each like the optical sticks. In that case you have to figure out for sure what you would really prefer before going with the higher costing mechanical rotary option using happs rotary 12 position's.
One other consideration is what version of MAME you are running, and if you have any preferences in what you are running. The Rotary Interface with the mechanicals will work in any mame build because it just uses the keyboard assigned standard inputs, but to use the optical interface you do need to use something like EMU+ or otherwise for the rotary games, which would have the optical enhancements.
That's all the info I can conjure up to help present some things to think about along the way. Aside from the fact that I do like the mechanical rotary sticks, I think if I were deciding this I would not lean towards the optical stick because the only game I know of that used it was cal 50 (there may be a lot more games that used it but I don't know them)...but there are many games that originally used the 12 position ones, and I'd want to go that route just to get the best realism. On that note, the mechanical rotarys work just fine on the cal 50 game. You get total control over the sensitivity/speed in MAME, and you can make each mechanical rotation act somewhat like a spinner action, so you can either do a single click rotation and have cal 50's character move in an 8way increment like Ikari...or you can move the joystick faster and it starts to look more like a spinner is controlling him. It's great!