Astro City panel mount spinners?

[dos]

I'd like to run an Arkanoid board in my NAC, and was thinking about getting an old panel and mounting spinners on it like this:

Trouble is I have never actually owned any spinners and don't really know how they mount or what models would be appropriate for Arkanoid and mounting in a Japanese control panel. Has anyone done this? What kind of brackets should the panel I'm looking for have? Seimitsu old style NA fit, Seimitsu SS fit, some kind of Sanwa? If someone could school me on the basics of spinners and mounting them in panels I would really appreciate it!

 

[rewrite]

Taito spinners are awful to install. You have to pop the top off of them with a slide punch in order to remove the top spinner thing, and then put it back on after mounting the rest of it under the panel. The Taito spinners, both the normal one and the Ghox one, are supposed to be put on this way. They mount just fine into Taito panels as-is, which AO says are Sanwa JLF mounts.

The Taito ones, of course, would be the "proper" ones for Arkanoid.

 

[jugu]

I have such a panel coming to me soon. I had planned on using it on my Egret 2, but have since learned that the spinners are too deep and won't fit in an Egret 2 unless you modify the panel area, which I am not willing to do.

 

[dos]

Taito spinners are awful to install. You have to pop the top off of them with a slide punch in order to remove the top spinner thing, and then put it back on after mounting the rest of it under the panel. The Taito spinners, both the normal one and the Ghox one, are supposed to be put on this way. They mount just fine into Taito panels as-is, which AO says are Sanwa JLF mounts.

The Taito ones, of course, would be the "proper" ones for Arkanoid.

From what I've seen Egret panels have the joystick mounts vertically oriented (like most stick mounts), but every picture I see of a US Arkanoid panel (can't find pictures of the underside of any Japanese spinner panels) has the spinner mounted horizontally:

Can you configure the spinner to work vertically, or do I have to specifically look for a Japanese market spinner?

 

[rewrite]

Taito spinners are awful to install. You have to pop the top off of them with a slide punch in order to remove the top spinner thing, and then put it back on after mounting the rest of it under the panel. The Taito spinners, both the normal one and the Ghox one, are supposed to be put on this way. They mount just fine into Taito panels as-is, which AO says are Sanwa JLF mounts.

The Taito ones, of course, would be the "proper" ones for Arkanoid.

From what I've seen Egret panels have the joystick mounts vertically oriented (like most stick mounts), but every picture I see of a US Arkanoid panel (can't find pictures of the underside of any Japanese spinner panels) has the spinner mounted horizontally:




Can you configure the spinner to work vertically, or do I have to specifically look for a Japanese market spinner?

The spinner only spins, it doesn't matter how it's mounted, it still spins left and right regardless of the baseplate's orientation.

@jugu, This is bad news, I'd had intentions of using spinners on my E2 as well, for Ghox, and it didn't look like depth was going to be a problem, but I got a bit lazy finding punches to take the top off of the spinner so I never finished setting it up.

 

[jugu]

A friend has the same panel and he couldn't mount it inside his Egret 2, but fit nicely in his Astro City as that appears to have deeper control panel space.

 

[dos]

The spinner only spins, it doesn't matter how it's mounted, it still spins left and right regardless of the baseplate's orientation.

Ahh gotcha, been so long since I played Arkanoid in an arcade I didn't remember if it spun freely or from one end to another

 

[rewrite]

The spinner only spins, it doesn't matter how it's mounted, it still spins left and right regardless of the baseplate's orientation.

Ahh gotcha, been so long since I played Arkanoid in an arcade I didn't remember if it spun freely or from one end to another

The NES controller for Arkanoid has endpoints in its spinner, the arcade version spins freely .

 

[jugu]

So my spinner panel came in, and it mounts just fine in my Egret 2. I'm following up with my friend to see why his spinners were too deep. The mounting holes lined up except for the center holes. Looks and feels awesome. Now I just need a wire harness adapter to go from Sega to Taito.

 

[rcantor77]

I have one of these spinner panels for my Egret 2... but does anyone actually know what 2-player spinner games there are that can make use of it..?

Every one I know is an alternating 2-player game and so only requires a single spinner.

 

[nem]

There's Puchi Carat at least.

 

[mukiex]

I'm pretty sure the games list amounts to:

- Puchi Carat
- Some obscure Akranoid sequel

I've been fiending to find an Astro City-compatible panel that will fit 28mm sockets for spinners 'cause as much as I like Taito's double-spinner panel, I don't think I'm brave enough to wire up and maintain mechanical spinners. I'd just use my Blast City panel but the joystick socket's only 24mm so it's a no-go.

 

[nem]

Some obscure Akranoid sequel

Correct. Arkanoid Returns has it too.

 

[mukiex]

Correct. Arkanoid Returns has it too.

On a side note, this topic is basically the holy grail I've been looking for for months. For the life of me, I've never found an actual photo of a Puchi Carat arcade machine with two spinner knobs on the main panel. I'd almost given up hope until I found this thread.

I'm hoping that eventually the MiSTer project gets a Taito F3 core but in the meanwhile I'm not too good to get some off-the-shelf spinner controllers and map them to the X and Y axes on a mouse to get 2P Puchi Carat working in Mame or even a Playstaition 1 emulator. I've got a currently-unused Blast City panel that I'm planning on turning into a 3-button joystick with a spinner for each player.

Using Street Fighter II to describe a 6-button layout, I'm gonna install the spinners in the HK location, plug up the buttons on MK and HP, and leave LP/LK/MP as the only pushbuttons. Should be good for spinner games and... Virtua Fighter/DOA? And Magical Drop.

edit: And I should probably ask here, but has anyone ever made a reproduction version of the Egret spinner knob that can be used on another available spinner or rotary encoder? Would love to have a modern spinner with that classic knob style. Maybe interest will kick up after the Egret II Mini comes out. I'm definitely picking up the spinner combo for that one.

 

[mukiex]

Walp, here's what I'm doing in the meanwhile:

It's a GRS USB spinner with a blue decal on top installed just high enough to not touch the other buttons.

These are all temporary buttons but I'm thinking about mapping left/right mouse where the two white ones are and regular joystick buttons where the green ones are.

I've got a Raspberry Pi 4 with a VirtualHere server license so I can put RetroPie on it and have it double as a wi-fi/ethernet controller. Just gonna have it be the "brains" of this stick. The body was "parts-only" and heavily UV-damaged and I got the Blast City panel in the box, as the original owner was gonna build it up but never got around to it. I've already got a 2-player HSS-0136 so I was wondering what I was gonna do with this 'til the idea of turning it into a spinner-focused machine came up.

 

[mukiex]

Welp, after looking around and realizing that there's no publicly-posted dimensions for this thing, this is about as close as I'm gonna get to a 3D model of the Taito spinner knob without just straight up buying one and measuring it out myself.

From photos and some talk, I did gather:

1. It's 1.5" wide, probably
2. It has 125 notches carved around it (from manually counting, ugh)

So far as I can gather, nobody's making repro units of these guys, and there's no generic knobs that quite match their style, so I'm probably just gonna leave it here unless I find any other leads or learn how to use a CNC machine.

edit: Looking up the likely knob diameter (38mm, or 1.5”) and the japanese word for “knob”, I got SUPER close. I’m mildly depressed that somewhere on the internet is the exact spinner knob I’m looking for, but I just don’t know what magical set of characters would get me there:

https://m.imgur.com/a/Sbs4FtA

 

[mukiex]

I'm about to fly out for a week but it's comin' together! I

I still need to add the 25 cent "home" buttons to the back (will be printing out a template so I know where to drill), and I'll need to find my acrylic plate's screws (got some Puchi Carat arcade art coming in), and I've still gotta wait for the rest of the cable connectors to come in, and worse still, I'll need to touch up some of those plastidip scratches (it won't look perfect but the original casing is heavily UV-damaged).

But it's coming together! Eventually I'd love to play an F3 MiSTer port version of Puchi Carat (and I'm not above just buying the game on eBay and waiting for a deal on an F3 motherboard), but I'm kinda happy to see the mainboard come together like this. I'd also like to get a more accurate spinner knob, but that could be much further away. Would be nice to see a repro get made with 8/6mm adapter rings for the various spinners sold online.

 

[mukiex]

I've finally finished building it! Now all I have to do is unbuild it and fix all the plastidip holes. ^o^

Features:

- 2 GRS-USB spinners w/ 30mm pinball buttons on the sides wired to their left/right mouse buttons.
- 1 Brook Zero-Pi, 1 Brook Retro, mostly 'cause that's what I had on-hand at the time
- Controllers are on a USB hub wired to a Neutrik port on the outside.
- Raspberry Pi 4 internal running RetroPie. Has VirtualHere for networked controls.
- Pi4 has 2 USB-3 and a HDMI port on the outside.
- I don't actually own a Taito F3 board, thems 'spensive
- Should I make a showcase topic?

The controls work great on MiSTer and if I ever find a cheap F3 board, I'll probably look into some kind of SuperGun solution that lets me send the button signals out directly from the Pi or something; I'm not dealing with old geared spinner assemblies.

Backside:

 

[streetfighterken]

@rewrite what's this punch tool you're referring to?