PDP is the one that immediately pops into my mind.
If Happ unveils a new arcade stick, it should be at Evo with this playing.
I’d buy an official Happ/iL stick. I love my custom, but I’m poor and ordering more is outside my financial range at the moment.
That actually makes a lot of sense. I do, however, want to see what other suggestions may be around first. Regardless, You’re quite right. I googled “happmart,” and the fifth response was the thread he posted in.
I kind of have a bad taste for PDP (Formerly Pelican). They ruined their FightPads by making them common ground, but nearly impossible to dual mod with, and they made the MK stick with Zippy microswitches, and they made it not common ground, and attached the buttons to the non-common ground PCB to make it even harder to dual mod. I kind of don’t want them making a stick that they’re going to ruin the improved parts with by making it difficult as heck to do a mod.
I had to second this.
Well played sir.
If this is an open call to the Happ family i for one wish to praise them for their continued support and encourage them to look into some happ backed peripherals of their own.
This is what should be done. Once a consensus is reached put together a well spoken e-mail. It will be 10000000x more professional than ‘Check out this thread d00d!’
I can clap to this, as I’m still firmly in the happ parts camp of customs
I still keep my old MAS just for the American Arcade experience. Love the TE but it can never replace my Happ based MAS.
After getting my ass kicked pretty thoroughly at Magfest, and being a bit spoiled by the arcade sticks of my friends, I have found myself drifting a bit east in my joystick preferences. What I would love to see from Happ is a premium joystick that truly gives that Japanese made ones a run for their money. What I love about my Eurosticks is that they have even distribution for the activation distance for all directions, and that they feel like they are military-grade durable. What I don’t like about them is that they are bulky, the movement isn’t so smooth, and they bounce around like crazy when they are released. With Japanese sticks I love the precise feeling of them, especially with an octo-gate, but they feel a lot more delicate-- they were not designed to take a thrashing, because Japanese players don’t play that way.
If Happ could somehow make a joystick that has the best of both-- a durable, low-profile joystick that has both a square articulator and the option of adding gates and a perfectly balanced spring and bat top to remove the “bounciness,” I think we might be looking at the best darned joystick ever. Most of these joysticks from either the East or West have been seen very little actual change in design for the better part of 20 years, and I would love to see some innovation. Happ has made some great products in the past, and I think that if they get a good foothold in the growing home console market we could see some more great products from them.
Hello,
I am Frank Happ, Twenty - Five years ago I started Happ Controls in my Garage, that is my only similarity to the Fantastic Mr Steve Jobs.
I was not aware of Syoryuken , but I picked up the post by seeing it on my Google Daily search for HAPP news.
I am Impressed and Humbled by the support that the Fighting Game Community has given to Happ Controls over many years.
We are very HAPPy to improve our products for Elite Gamers .Your suggestions are very good , example, why use long pushbuttons when the control pannels are mostly made of steel now and we could use Cherry switches, we use them in our Gambling Machine illuminated pushbuttons now.
We will talk about some of these things next week in an engineering meeting.
We also have LCD Flat Panel Monitors which can retrofit game cabinets,Glass CRT Monitors are very hard to find.
Please give us any and all suggestions we will consider them,
contact me @ Frank.happ@happ.com
Thank you , Frank
Yay!
I think the most important part is having low profile buttons that can easily fit in metal panel cabs and off the shelf sticks originally designed for 30mm Japanese buttons. Even if Cherrys aren’t viable due to cost or some other reason, having the switches easily replaceable (as compared to the riveted switches in Sanwa’s OBS-30s) would be enough.
I’m jumping on this bandwagon. If HAPP made low profile buttons, they’d easily make sales. HAPP long barrel buttons are already $2 vs Japanese ones that cost $4. Cherry microswitches feel so much better than the type Sanwa and Seimitsu use, and all their knock offs. No matter what design HAPP chose for their low profile buttons, I’d only request that they be durable and that they center the microswitch. I personally don’t mind the non-centered versions, but a lot of people do and I think they’d have better sales since the stigma seems against non-centered designs like they currently have now.
If HAPP was to design a joystick that was low profile too, and fixed a lot of the joystick flaws and make the gates easily swappable, and to offer new gate choices, I think they’d find a market here. I’m really happy with my Seimitsu joystick, I think it’s fantastic, but Japanese buttons just aren’t my style.
Has anyone compared the plastics of iL buttons to HAPP buttons? I know since iL uses Cherry they’re considered superior, but is that all? I personally haven’t touched a new HAPP button, but I have an iL, and I was able to tell the difference between the iL’s nylon button to the Yenox ABS buttons. Huge quality difference alone in the plastic. Springs are better in the iL, too, the Yenox ones are just nasty. If there is a difference in feel, then I would also suggest HAPP consider what made their buttons so good feeling when they were manufactured through iL than their own plants in China. I’ve also read about the luster of the plastic being very different, with HAPP buttons being a dull ugly color compared to a brighter, glossier iL button. I’d like to note I’m not ripping on HAPP buttons in comparison to iL, I’m merely noting what I’ve read, and I’m disclaiming I have personally not compared the two since I only have iL and not HAPP.
One thing I’d request, is to offer a smaller button than 30 mm. I know I’m probably in a huge minority, but 30 mm in line buttons are simply too far apart and feel uncomfortable to my fingers. Offering 30 mm would obviously be a wise business choice as all the popular manufactured stick control panels have 30 mm holes. It would be great to have 24 mm as well as an alternative and for the people who like to use 24 mm buttons as start, select, back, and so on.
As someone who is doing a bit of trailblazing on the PDP TE modding front, I can attest that the thing is indeed a pain in the ass to mod the traditional way due to some poor manufacturing and design choices. The PCB is pretty much worthless, but you can’t remove it because of the buttons that are attached to it, and the plexiglass is a nightmare to remove. They glued the darned thing down with carpet tape which may as well be superglue, and ontop of that the artwork is printed directly on the glass which means you need either A) a chemical solvent or B) a motorized polisher or C) both if you want to use custom artwork on it-- and that’s assuming you don’t break the plexi trying to get it off. Until Tek Innovations starts selling replacement plexi for it, custom artwork on the PDP is a ways off for most people.
It’s a shame that it’s so difficult in some ways to customize the PDP stick, because as a case it truly is magnificent-- rock solid construction, the oh-so-comfy memory foam, and of course, the piano hinges and custom locking mechanism. Those features are some of the most innovative I have ever seen in a wooden case, and they’d make the stick a modder’s delight if not for the issues with the PCB and plexiglass. Hopefully, with PDP’s upcoming MK Klassic arcade stick, they will heed the complaints people made about the TE stick and try to do better. I’m hoping that we get everything that was great about the TE stick, minus the annoyances-- chiefly, I hope that this time the T-molding and plexiglass come off easily without damaging anything, and they give it a proper common-ground PCB that will work with an Imp switch.
I don’t want to sell the PDP TE short, because it was a very admirable effort, but they left a lot of room for improvement-- so much so that I opted to just ditch the top panel of the stick altogether and replace it with a custom one. Granted you kind of have to go that route if you want to play games other than MK on a PDP stick, but perhaps in the future PDP themselves will start manufacturing sticks with more versatile layouts. The response to the TE has been pretty tremendous even with the flaws it has, so I hope they can improve upon it.
Carpet glue should loosen up with enough heat. Have you tried a heat gun on low settings or a hairdryer on high? The glue from the carpet tape should soften and you should be able to use a spatula to scrape it off. The glue should also melt before the plastic gets hot enough to melt, so melting the plexi top shouldn’t be a problem.
This reminds me of wood glue working, it’s really strong and bonds wood perfect, and if you need to ever adjust a joint, you can heat the glue and pull it apart. Once dry, it’s rock solid again.
AhemYou guys are getting quite off topic.
Sorry. I get carried away when it’s in the wee hours of the morn…
Low profile buttons would be great. Please keep them convex AND concave, as I’m sure plenty of people have a preference for either. A low profile stick would be fantastic, as it would open up the possibility of installing it in a case less than 3" tall. However, I’d cop a redesigned stick ONLY if you have the same tension as you do on the OG sticks like the competition. That’s what makes it feel like a Happ, not a JLF. I’m sure with the correct spring it could be done. Interchangable ball/bat tops would be nice as well.
I love the tension in the Competition sticks, but I don’t like how they bounce around when they are released. Chances are this could be corrected by finding a better balance between the bat top and the spring, like making the bat top heavier and the shaft hollow, or something like that. I’m not an engineer so I don’t quite know the physics of it all, but a less bouncy joystick that retains the level of tension on the Competition stick would be ideal for me.
You seem to sign posts off with a manually typed signature too actually. I wonder if that’s standard business etiquette.
At any rate, the main concern I have with this post is that it suggests old products might be replaced with new ones. While making short barrel pushbuttons might serve the elite home market, I’m sure there’s a need for the vintage cabinet restoration market to maintain their older wooden cabinets by replacing worn out parts.
Product diversification might be preferable in this case because I believe the video game community’s primary interest in your product is an authentic arcade feel that mimics that from the golden era, which can ultimately only be achieved with the original parts used in in the original cabinets. I think the last thing any of us want to see is another great discontinued product.
However if product diversification is not possible due to the cost of materials, a new hybrid button type with internal threading to screw on a button extender might work out to serve both markets. In this way you could produce a button that could be customized to fit the application, serving both markets and you could choose to make only the number of button extenders necessary to maintain old cabinets no longer in production.
Since you’ve brought up the topic of CRTs and LCDs, I feel that there are also a few factors which make modern L.C.D.s and Plasma displays unsuitable for vintage games:
[LIST]
[]Screen curvature has a magnifying effect on the image, which alters the final image output. If I recall correctly this may be the reason why some old light gun games are incompatible with L.C.D.s and may’ve also been used artistically on some older, popular titles such as Street Fighter II.
[]L.C.D.s don’t have scanlines, which were definitively used to artistic effect. You can read more about this in an article called Scanlines Demystified.
[*]High Definition monitors, televisions often post-process a low resolution signal to make it compatible with modern displays. The methods currently used are okay fine for movies, they’re far too slow and often employ techniques which create gradient blurring which is destructive to the nature of video game pixel art. The New Definitive H.D.T.V. lag thread here on these forums details the problem. Some video scalers exist, which you can read about in detail in this article called Deinterlacing + Scaling + Processing +Questions+Answers 2010 but most of them aren’t very well suited for video games because while their processors are faster than those found in televisions, the
[/LIST]
If these three issues could be resolved, I think relatively few people would mind a complete departure from Cathode Ray Tubes, which are bigger, heavier, and clunkier than necessary while eating up a lot of precious energy resources. The first might be possibly be solved by a magnifying glass type product or screen protector that attaches directly to the front of an L.C.D.
The latter two problems have already been solved by a Japanese company called Micomsoft, with their popular XRGB series of units, which are described in great detail at the xrgb wiki and this youtube video review. This is great for the japanese but unfortunately, no such comprehensive solution exists that is easily accessible and affordable to people living in the west.
Because of this I’ve noticed that many, many classic video game enthusiasts go through great lengths to import these expensive products at relatively high costs, ranging between $50 (XRGB1) to $450 (XRGB 3) plus shipping and importation fees halfway across the world pendent on the model and its features. If a competing unit with features similar to the X.R.G.B. 2 could be made by H.A.P.P. at a reasonable price ($150-$200) it’d sell relatively well amongst arcade P.C.B. collectors. This unit had an M.S.R.P. close to $200 USD, but the last time I saw it on auction at ebay it went for over $300, as the product is both discontinued and the supply is growing rather scarce when compared to the demand.
A budget version that could properly mimic the properties of a standard definition C.R.T. with just Composite or S-video, priced for between $50-$80 similar to Micomsoft’s recently announced XRGB-mini Flame Miester might even sell like hotcakes. This goes doubly so since S-video was a relatively high grade video connection standard which has been phased out of the general marketplace. This left owners of vintage video equipment for not only games but also professional editors using vintage equipment and laserdisc enthusiasts as well, feeling a little burned.
Please do keep in mind that analog to analog conversions are often better than analog to digital conversions as it prevents poor signal transduction. It’d be nice if a HAPP produced competitor utilized Component YPrPb Video or most preferably V.G.A. output, since V.G.A. utilizes R.G.B. style signaling.
Edit: More detail in the final paragraph.