RE: Cinematronics multigame?

G'day folks,

Given that Rip Off and Armor Attack share the same pinouts and have 10
buttons (and room for a couple extra if you'd like to put hyperspace
buttons in), I'd pick these control panels. I can verify that the Rip
Off cabinet has enough room for my RO/SC/AA/SQ hack that I documented a
couple years ago (and should still be on spies.com). I even have enough
room to put this next hack to add Space Wars/Barrier/War of the
Worlds/Daemon in, too.

I strongly recommend against using the actual Space Wars cabinet/control
panel, as the buttons aren't that good and I've proven you really don't
need the extra space (even if you take the more bulky approach to
conversions like I have where I have one sound board from every game in
the cabinet). Now if you want to put one of the Cinematronics 22" or
25" screens into a cabinet, well then maybe use a Space Wars
cabinet...but you'll find it isn't as deep as you need.

If you'd like to make a universal control panel for any Cinematronics
cabinet based off of a given game, Space War's design would be good
place to start from. But if you were going to make a Space Wars
selection keypad from scratch, then I'd use telephone touchtone pad with
that nice 3 by 4 matrix that can be well utilized with Barrier's "four
direction button control....push 2 for up, 8 for down, 4 for left and 6
for right" and Sundance's "nine button controller in a three by three
matrix".

Zonn...did you get the Daemon control panel? What does it use??
Joysticks???

I can also confirm that if you use a Star Castle control panel, there's
extra room to drill a couple more holes for buttons so you can play Rip
Off and Armor Attack. I munged alot of Star Castle control panels back
when I made solderless SC-> SC + RO kits for people in the early 90's.

Hope all these disjointed memories help in zeroing in on a control panel
design!

               Steven S Ozdemir
               sso@plpt.com (my company renamed itself in Feb)
               sso@dsc.com (good for a few more months)
               ozdemir@xenon.stanford.edu (permanent...weekly)

ps - I think a 16 slot approach would be enough. All games except for
Tail Gunner and Speed Freak (and Boxing Bugs...that's the one game I
keep forgetting) would fit nicely in 11 slots leaving some extra room
for menu programs and new discoveries/development. The eleven other
games that I came up with are:

Space Wars
Barrier
Sundance
Star Hawk
Warrior
Rip Off
Star Castle
War of the Worlds
Armor Attack
Solar Quest
Daemon

<and Rocket Racer or QB3 both by Rockola....if we ever find them>

>----------
>From: Clay Cowgill[SMTP:ClayC@diamondmm.com]
>Sent: Friday, March 13, 1998 1:49 PM
>To: 'vectorlist@spies.com'
>Cc: Clay Cowgill
>Subject: RE: Cinematronics multigame?
>
>> > I seem to recall some discussion about patching the existing games
>> to
>> > use a single "multigame" control panel
>>
>> I've patched several games to use a unified control panel, as well
>> as using the same dip switch settings. I used Rip Off and Armor
>> Attack as the model.
>>
>Hey! That's what I like to hear! Not to disappoint Ray, but I think
>whoever said that Star Castle and Armor Attack were probably the best
>"candidates" probably had it right. And if Mark's already got a good
>bit of the work done...
>
>> > (and I think Joe was tinkering with the sound stuff?)
>>
>> I also have a universal DSP based sound card, but the highest priority
>> is on getting a decent menu running.
>>
>What are you using? If it's fairly cheap and available I might try to
>talk you into letting me leech the design to use with the Sega stuff...
>:-)
>
>-Clay
>
Received on Fri Mar 13 16:29:59 1998