GRS Flight Yoke mount

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so this has been on the back burner for a while. I purchased one of these GRS Flight Yokes from Amazon yonks ago, fully intending to build a Star Wars cabinet, and maybe loading some other suitable games that use.analog control.

Then decision paralysis set in, and I have to date started and abandoned at least 8 cabinet ideas ranging from full stand-up to bartop to absolute minimalist.

Today, I said “screw it” and just built the thing.

I used the dimensions page from the manual for the mount. (This is surprisingly wrong, there are some.undocumented places that ypu need holes, and the documented ones are not quite right to pass the one connector through. I caught some of that in the CAD stage, but missed the one factor. In the end though, it worked.

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The inside is pretty simple. The only “tricky” bit is thst the edges of the front and top are bevelled. I cheated a bit on that, and cut the bevels on the table saw. (Not realizing before I planned this adventure that my table saw has a maximum angle of 45° – and I needed a 50° bevel. I resomved that by shimming the fence end of the board to a 5° angle from the table. I do not recommend this, but it worked.)

Now, to complete the misadventure… Retroarch (Retropie, Batocera, etc) doesn’t like if a controller does not have a D-pad. It insists on having a digital up, down, left, right, and it will happily map the analog joystick mode to those features, and then refuse to map the analog features to the axes that you have already mapped to the D-pad. The result is weird. Fire.up the Star Wars arcade game and it sort of works, but the controls aren’t analog. The cursor goes from no response to full direction suddenly.

So… next step will be either just run a native MAME session, and ditch the (actually quite nice) Retroarch / Emulationstation interface or find another way around it all.

At this point, my feeling is to put the GRS into mouse mode. In that mode, though it cannot control the menu. I feel like I could grab a Zerodelay board and grab the buttons from the 1up interface, then just add a quick and dirty D-pad. The Zerodelay becomes the Retropad, and the GRS is a mouse… with 8 buttons.

There must be a right way to do this…

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Olay… got it about half sussed. I can at least get analog control, lol.

Played Star Wars again, nostalgia! Got to the 3rd wave and thought “How the F did I manage this back then!”

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Star Wars was fun. I also really liked Spy Hunter.

Memories of the quarters queue or whatever you would call getting in line by placing your quarter in line below the screen. I tried doing that a few years back and the kids had no clue what I was doing. :joy:

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Same boat here. I have had some controls for probably two years now and had been wanting them for several years before that. Just yesterday I learned about batocera. I almost loaded it up…then I saw how even more modern games are working pretty well…now I will need to add some sort of more modern controllers as well. PS! ridge racer was one a few of us played a lot I would not mind playing that again.

The idea though is teach these kids what gaming is like when you only have 3 lives…and each three lives costs a quarter.

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I quite like Batocera for most of its features, but some of the configuration is a little lacking. I think it tries to be a little too generic, so a specialized controller like the flight yoke makes trouble. I set up a trackball, which was easy enough, it just treats it as a mouse.

I might go back to Retropie though for the more advanced config options. Same performance (same MAME core) in games, maybe fewer emulators default, but I just use the Commodore 64 and MAME emulators myself.

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That is good to know, thanks.

There are a few old casino games, MAME I think. Those might be a fun way to make a more specific machine and style my friends would enjoy. Then if that goes well maybe a more arcade centric design. On that same note I always wanted to make a vending machine as well…I have no idea why they just look fun.

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