Posted by rmfx on February 20, 2002 at 01:47:11:
In Reply to: In a perfect world... someone would rewrite the 4-way roms... posted by Chris on February 19, 2002 at 23:05:55:
How much do they cost? Not much. And an extra stick actually doesn't crowd things up that badly, if you put it between and slightly forward your 8 ways. And it can be daisy-chained into your 8-way so you won't need extra inputs.
The problem is that 8-ways allow 2 switches to be pushed when moving the stick from one cardinal (UDLR) direction to another, and will either give you a big dead spot (decreasing responsiveness on corners) or will cause your character to go into an oscillating stair-step pattern, which is usually not what you want. There is no software fix for this, because it is impossible for any code to divine which way you are actually intending to go, without a distinct input.
A 4-way is identical to an 8-way in every respect, except that the 4-way has a diamond-shaped restrictor hole in the base, which forces the stick to release one switch before contacting another one. It is also set up so that the next switch is contacted almost IMMEDIATELY after releasing the previous one, giving better response in a 4-way game than an 8-way ever could.
So stop blaming the people who spend their precious free time to program code for us, without getting one dime in return, but plenty of abuse. If you're going to bother building an arcade machine, you might as well get the proper equipment, especially when it costs so little.