Thinking about building an arcade machine? DO IT! But first, consider the controls. The controls you choose will decide what games you can play, due to hardware and software compatibilities that vary across games. For us, the best approach enables us to access the broadest range of games in a small footprint.
The controller boards
Most arcade machines use a keyboard controller to run the joysticks and buttons. This works great for retro gaming, since emulators are highly mappable. Unfortunately, if you try and play modern games with a keyboard controller, things break down.
Because modern games have no standard for keyboard controls, controls will vary from game to game. Some will use the arrow keys for movement, some will use WASD. The “action” button will be space bar in some games and CTRL in others, etc. You might get around these issues by remapping the in-game controls, allowing you to play on your keyboard-powered arcade controls, but you’ll need to do this remapping exercise on most games. Sadly, not all games will let you remap controls, so you’ll either have to get a third party button mapper and do your mapping in there (which can have adverse effects if you set it up wrong), or you just won’t be able to play that game on your arcade machine.
Are we having fun yet?
Compare all of that to using X-Input controller boards on your arcade machine. Most modern games [that you’d want to play with a controller] work with X-Input controls by default, no mapping required — including games that don’t allow mapping. What was a remapping nightmare is no reduced to zero effort: most games just work.
Plus, since emulators are highly mappable, there’s no issues configuring your retro games to work with X-input controls (and if you’re using Polycade AGS, then the emulators are already mapped for you).
Ok, so we know we want X-input boards in our arcade machine, but what about the “gotchas” that X-input boards have when used in an arcade machine:
- They are built to change modes. Since these boards are typically designed for “fightsticks”, they are made to change modes (xbox, ps, android, etc) by pressing key combinations. Since arcade machines are usually mapped to one protocol, changing modes effectively breaks the machine.
- The player order is unpredictable. Sometimes Player 1 might be on the right side, sometimes they’re on the left. It can vary from restart to restart.
Luckily, we’ve solved this issue. Our recent collaboration with Brook produced what we feel are the perfect controller boards for arcade machines: an X-input board that can set player order on the hardware level, no mode switching. Check it out here: Neo-Arcade Controller Board.
The button pattern
When it comes to choosing a button pattern for retro games the classic 6 button “street fighter” style arcade layout and 2 “function” buttons will get you everything you need to run basically any classic arcade game that uses a joystick and buttons.
When we started tinkering around playing modern games on arcade machines, we soon discovered that the closer we could get to replicating the usage of a modern controller, the more games we could play. For example, because the “trigger” buttons on a modern controller can be held down with your index finger, while allowing you to access the rest of the buttons with your thumb, games often expect you to hold down the trigger buttons while pressing other buttons. Rocket League and racing games typically employ this control scheme — your acceleration is the trigger, “A” is jump, etc. Other games often use the triggers as a “shift” button to enable access to more functions (Secrets of Grindea and Akane are examples of this).
How do we translate these play styles to arcade controls?
Traditional 8-button arcade and fightstick layouts place the 7th and 8th buttons (trigger buttons) to the right of your classic “Street Fighter” button pattern. We found this to be inconvenient, as these buttons were a bit too far out of the way, and it’s awkward using your pinky to hold them down while you press other buttons. Moving the trigger buttons under our primary button set gave us easy access to operate these buttons with our thumb, which feels natural and enables you to easily perform button combos.
The trackball-mouse
If you’re deeply interested in trackball games or more of an arcade purist, the 3” trackball is the ideal choice.
However, if you’re planning on playing a lot of modern games, consider the trackball-mouse pattern. We like this for the modern arcade because it gives us a much cleaner experience managing Steam and other desktop functions without having to access our keyboard and mouse. Additionally, if you’re delving deep into modern games, you’ll find many require mouse usage in the menus, despite being otherwise playable with x-input controls.
The trackball-mouse is just convenient, and makes us feel like we maintain the arcade experience across game-to-game nuances.
The octagonal restrictor plate: an elegant solution to the 4-way vs 8-way joystick dilemma
We think an octagonal plate makes your joysticks feel better, and it also seems to make your Street Fighter-style moves easier to execute.
A little secret that we learned from Bryan at ParadiseArcade is that the octagonal restrictor plate makes your sticks work well for 4-way games (in addition to 8-way games). Because the octagonal plate allows the bottom of the joystick to sit in a corner for each cardinal direction (up/down/left/right), you don’t risk drifting and accidentally hitting a diagonal.
This solution is not perfect like a true 4-way joystick, because you can still hit a diagonal during a transition if you really lean into the corners. That said, the octagonal plate is a simple and mostly effective solution that’s ridiculously cheap (here’s a great one for the Sanwa JLF joystick), low-maintenance, and user friendly.
The spinner: diagonal > horizontal
A normal spinner is mapped to a single axis, the horizontal one. Software like MAME allows you to map vertical-axis spinner games to the horizontal axis, so a horizontal spinner is normally all you need. But what if you want to play Bit Trip Flux or Bit Trip Beat on your arcade machine? These games won’t let you remap the axis. Maybe there’s a 3rd party software solution, but we find these to be clunky and buggy. A more elegant solution is to make your spinner operate on a horizontal axis — on the hardware level. This won’t negatively affect any spinner game, since they force the gameplay into single axis, and by making your spinner operate horizontally, it will work for a vertical or horizontal game by default.
In order to hack your spinner, you’ll need some kind of mouse controller like the Opti-Wiz. Then you need to figure out what the pinout of your spinner is — of the 4 cables, you’ll have:
- Power
- Ground
- X-
- X+
On your Opti-Wiz, you’re interested in the following connections:
- X-
- X+
- Y-
- Y+
- Power
- Ground
Connect your power and ground from the spinner to the Opti-Wiz as normal. Then, create 2 Y-shaped cables. Connect the first Y-shaped cable from Spinner X+ to the Opti-Wiz X+ AND Y+. Connect the second Y-shaped cable from Spinner X- to the Opti-Wiz X- AND Y-.
The result is that moving your spinner to the left brings the mouse to to bottom left corner of your screen, and moving the spinner to the right brings your mouse to the top right corner of the screen.
This concludes our write-up for modern arcade controls! Interested in arcade gaming solutions? Learn more about Polycade here: https://polycade.com/
