Vector Game Controls

cavnex

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I'm hoping the community can help me get a solid grasp on the variety of controls that are on Atari and Sega vector games. I'd be interested in Cinematronics/Vectorbeam as well - but Atari and Sega are a greater priority to me.

To be clear - I'm looking for the variety of controls; Tempest has buttons and the spinner (which isn't a pot, but instead effectively pulses + direction); Space Duel has buttons only; Star Wars has the famous yoke (2 pots) and a series of buttons. Star Trek had ... and I might be wrong, a spinner and buttons. Major Havoc had a roller (I'd be interested to know if the roller interface was similar to a spinner electrically) - I don't know if it had buttons.

Anyone who conclusively knows a Vector game + its controls and would be willing to reply here, I'd be exceptionally appreciative. [No, I'm not reproducing controls. Good lord, that's definitely not my skill set.]

Many thanks!
 
Klov or control panel pics will tell you a lot (number of buttons, which hand, etc). Black widow is the only one i can think of without buttons (for play)

MH roller is electronically the same as an optical spinner
All the sega games spinners were also optical (star trek, tac/scan, zektor)
Trackball is also optical (2 axis, quantum)

I'd start by making a table/spreadsheet of them all and then we can fill in the blanks
 
I don't understand the point of your post. Are you writing an article or a book? Why not just use Google. :confused:
 
You're right - rather than asking, I could've pulled all the manuals, found each section and catalogued. I admit that I was hoping one of the folks particularly familiar with the vector games would be able to iterate pretty much all of the games from memory. I certainly didn't mean any offense or irritation to anyone by asking, and if someone was annoyed - my sincere apologies.

Nope, not even remotely writing a book. I am doing something, but I prefer to not advertise my efforts - advertising a goal before success just reeks of vaporware, and old posts here demonstrate endless lists of vaporware. [Search my handle here on GitHub; you can probably make a very good guess by what you find.]

Thanks for the reply.
 
You're right - rather than asking, I could've pulled all the manuals, found each section and catalogued. I admit that I was hoping one of the folks particularly familiar with the vector games would be able to iterate pretty much all of the games from memory. I certainly didn't mean any offense or irritation to anyone by asking, and if someone was annoyed - my sincere apologies.

Seems reasonable to ask your question here. Put a few heads together and we can give you a good starting list. Here goes. Add on...

Quantum | Just a trackball
The Adventures of Major Havoc | weird roller (right & left) + 2 pushbuttons
Black Widow | Dual 8 way joysticks
Asteroids | 5 pushbuttons
Asteroids Deluxe | 5 pushbuttons
Space Duel | 10 pushbuttons (2 players simultaneously)
Tempest | Optical spinner + two buttons
Cosmic Chasm | Spinner + 3 pushbuttons, ambidextrous
Boxing Bugs | Spinner (?) or perhaps a pot + 3 pushbuttons, ambidextrous
Tac/Scan | Spinner + two pushbuttons, ambidextrous
Battlezone | two kung fu grips, plus one button
Star Castle | four pushbuttons
Lunar Lander | 3 buttons and one throttle lever

I guess this does become tedious pretty quickly. Perhaps you should put all the info you have into a google spreadsheet to show people what you're looking for and what info you're missing.
 
Doing this from memory, so one or two might be off; especially for the couple I don't own.

Atari
====
Lunar Lander - Thurster (pot?), 4 buttons
Asteroids - 5 buttons
Battlezone - 2 joysticks with 2 buttons each; 1 fire button
Red Baron - 1 joystick with 2 pots, 1 fire button
Asteroids Deluxe - 5 buttons
Tempest - spinner (encoder), 2 buttons
Space Duel - 10 buttons
Gravitar - 5 buttons
Black Widow - 2x 8 way joysticks
Quantum - 1 trackball (2 encoders)
Major Havoc - 1 roller (encoder), 2 buttons
Star Wars/ESB - yoke (2 pots), 4? buttons on yoke

Sega
====
Tac/Scan - 1 spinner (encoder), 4 buttons
Star Trek - 1 spinner (encoder), 4 buttons
Space Fury - 4 buttons
Eliminator - 4 buttons per player (2 or 4 player)
Zektor - 1 spinner (encoder), 4 buttons

Midway
=====
Omega Race - 1 spinner (pot to digital), 2 buttons

Centuri
=====
Aztarac - joystick (encoder), spinner (encoder??), 1 button

Rock-ola
=====
Demon - 10 buttons

Cine/VB
======
Space War/Space Wars - 21 buttons
Starhawk - 2 joysticks (4 switches each), 8 buttons
Barrier - 13 buttons
Speed Freak - 1 wheel (encoder), shifter (3 switches)
Warrior - 2 joysticks (4 switches each), 2 buttons
Sundance - 26 buttons
Tailgunner/Tailgunner 2 - 1 joystick (pot), 4 buttons
Armor Attack
Ripoff - 8 buttons
Star Castle - 4 buttons
Boxing Bugs - 1 encoder (digital), 4 buttons
Solar Quest - 6 buttons
War of the Worlds - 4 buttons
Cosmic Chasm - 1 encoder (digital), 6 buttons
 
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Aha! Exactly the kind of off-the-cuff things I was looking for.

I really was trying to get an upper count on ADC channels and maximum number of buttons (and yes, a typical joystick counts as 4 buttons on its own). Absolute details aren't critical; believe me, I'll pull the schematics of anything before I get too close to it.

You guys blew me away with some of those older units. (Sundance - 26 buttons? Good gosh, that was more than I expected!)

Many, many thanks, I truly appreciate the brain dump!
 
Animesuprj is certainly your man when it comes to knowing the Vector games! He's better than any Google search out there! :)

I asked myself the exact same question regarding controls for vector games a while back. I wanted to design a vector mame control panel that would be as all-encompassing as possible but NOT look like a horrid FrankenMame monstrosity panel.

In the end, I went with the following layout, which I'm extremely happy about:

Two 8-way joysticks with fire buttons on top (classic Black Widow joystick placement locations).
Track Ball in Middle (for Quantum)
Spinner off to the side (For all the spinner games)
Several buttons on both right and left side of panel (for easy use with the majority of vector games).

The panel looks very clean and it's totally functional for ALMOST all the games.

I say ALMOST because, there are several controllers for Vector games that are clearly missing from my Vector Mame panel. I omitted the following controllers:

a) Star Wars Yoke
b) Major Havoc Roller
c) Lunar Lander Thruster
d) Speed Freak steering Wheel.

For these 4 Vector games, I decided NOT to attempt to put them on a vector mame panel. It just wasn't practical because these controllers are all large and would take up too much space on a single panel.... not to mention they are very expensive to either find an original or reproduction.

I also could have gone with multiple control panels, each with their own "proper" controller....but really? Who wants to go through all that work and have to disconnect, take out, put in different panels, reconnect... and hope everything works right, just to play a different game? It would ruin the experience and fun (plus it would never look good).

So I ended up owning the actual vector game cabinets for 3 of the 4 listed above in order to play the real game, rather than try to play them in Vector Mame (I didn't get Speed Freak which is such a crappy game and too hard to find even if I wanted the actual game).

I use the Braze Asteroids multi-kit with the Lunar Lander thruster on my Asteroids cabinet, which is great because you can get three excellent games on one Cabinet... and the Lunar Lander Thruster is awesome! (But expensive).

If you are willing to go with a vector mame cabinet using a Zektor ZVG card and PC setup, along with the control panel layout I've detailed above, I really think you are locked and loaded to play MOST every vector game ever made.

It's not perfect. Believe me. I know that. There are some issues with Vector Mame and the DOS drivers for the mouse that I'm currently not happy with (the spinner and track ball doesn't respond well enough....yet.... in my opinion. But it's being worked on and hopefully will be solved in the coming months).

Using 8-way joysticks is also not perfect, but honestly, you can play Battlezone and other games just fine. I haven't noticed any problem at all in that regard, so I decided not to deal with the switchable joysticks and all those added mechanisms (which is possible if that's important to you).

Anyway, sorry to ramble so long. But I think your initial question about wanting to know all the Controls needed to play all the vector games is a good one. And I spent a lot of time thinking about it, and also talking with other collectors behind the scenes before I finalized my control panel design.

I hope my experience helps you out. Would love to hear comments from others who are interested.
 
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Just take the easy approach and buy all the dedicated vectors ;)

Also, Dan, Speed Freak a crappy game?! You'll have to come over and play mine; whenever I stop being lazy and put it back together, lol. It's awesome! How can you NOT like vector cows??
 
For most games, this is good enough.

Multi_Vector_CPO_v3.jpg


For those it does not support, you probably need the dedicated machine anyway. :cool:
 
Jason,

I'm going to buy a Speed Freak now! If only to get good at it an kick your ass!!!!!

PS. Were those black and white vector lines supposed to Cows???? I thought they were fire hydrants.
 
Vector cow!
1181242171243.png


You also pass people and cacti. If you can find a Speed Freak, I'd say go for it; it only took me about 3 years to find one. Had offers on others, just never worked out.
 
You know what's funny? For a moment this morning I actually thought to myself, "Maybe I really should try and land a Speed Freak. It's the only way to actually play that game, because the ROM in VectorMame is incomplete".

But then I just saw this on Youtube.... and I realized WHY IN THE WORLD WOULD I WANT THIS THING?????!!!! :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiynX1K_x0k
 
I took the takman multivector panel and hacked in temporary mounts for:

1. Star Wars/ESB yoke
2. trackball for Quantum

It was just for fun and looked terrible. Like someone else said, just track down the real machines with the weird controls. It's hardly worth it to install 21 buttons to play Space War (alone).
 
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