Introduction
Being
a fan of fighters, I didn’t think much of the 49-way optical
joysticks manufactured by Happ™/ Midway™/ Atari™ and
Williams™.
John St. Clair, the author of the book “Project Arcade” concluded
on his extremely helpful Build Your Own Arcade Controls (BYOAC) website
that “obviously, this (the 49-way joystick) is not an ideal joystick
to use.”
Why would I be interested in an expensive joystick that was originally
intended for only a few unique games, although that list included the revered
Sinistar? And even that game had a rubber “spider” to enable
more accurate control?
Then Randy Turner of Groovy Game Gear™ (GGG) developed his unique
GP-Wiz49™ encoder with a Digital Restriction Selector™ (DRS™)
that, as well as functioning in standard 49-way analog modes, allowed the
low-resolution analog joystick to switch between several different digital
modes, including 8-way mode for the majority of modern video games and
4-way mode for classics like Donkey Kong and Pac-Man and even 4-way diagonal
mode for games like Q*Bert and Congo Bongo.
The GP-Wiz49 Encoder
The announcement thread on the Build Your Own Arcade
Controls (BYOAC) forum quickly became fifteen pages full of excited questions
from arcade enthusiasts having one-joystick-to-play-them-all dreams. This
seemed to be the solution to the cluttered control panel, one joystick
that can act like many.
I followed the developments closely. Then the kicker came when Mark Oates,
known as Floyd on the BYOAC forum member, posted his 12-position rotary
interface hack for the Happ (Midway) 49-way joystick. These were the same
rotary interfaces that were originally used for Ikari Warriors, Midnight
Resistance and several other games.
Mark Oates' Rotary Adapter Kit
Druin's Rotary Interface Board
Initial reviews were positive. I loved the idea of having one set of
joysticks to play all my favorite games. I had to have one of these setups,
regardless of cost. And this is one of the costliest setups for joysticks
in the arcade controls world. Here are the estimated totals:
- Happ (Midway) 49-Way Joystick - $33 from GGG
- GP-Wiz49 Interface - $20-$35, depending on version from GGG
- 12-Position Rotary Interface - $30 for one
or $50 for two from Floyd’s
site
- Druin’s Rotary Interface - $25 - works
for one or two joysticks
- The total, minus shipping = roughly $105 for one set or $175 for two
sets
If these truly are the ultimate joysticks for accurate game play in the
greatest variety of games, then that cost is validated just in the savings
in space and the expense of buying alternate sets of controls for games
that require different types of controls. Are the days of huge control
panels with sets of all different types of joysticks numbered? Read on
to find out.
