But, back to the gear. Let's talk joysticks. Since I want everything to light up, the sources I had for sticks was pretty limited. Basically, it looks like Paradise Arcade Shop was pretty much my only choice. This isn't necessarily a bad thing as they send candy when they fill an order!
As you can see, the box was a tad hammered when I got it :
Of course, this was not likely the fault of Paradise, but of the postal system. But, it did make me a tad nervous about how the sticks inside would look.
Fortunately, nothing appeared off when I opened the box :
Inside, there was the previously mentioned candy (top right), and 5 individually wrapped sticks with RGB LED ball tops.
For a better look :
The micro switches in the sticks seem to click pretty loud, which hopefully will be a non-issue once the sticks are nicely mounted inside their wooden control panel box. (Spoiler Alert : They are fine once they are mounted.)
I wired up each of the sticks to an Ultimarc LED controller and a mini-PAC to make sure that they worked. Of the 5 sticks I bought, 4 of them worked perfect. One stick had a burned out red LED, which gave me the opportunity to find out how customer service is with Paradise Arcade.
I sent an e-mail and got a quick response asking if I had used resistors in line with the LEDs to avoid burning them out. According to the documentation for the PACLED64 boards from Ultimarc, there is no need for resistors in line, so I responded letting them know which controller I was using and that the documentation specifically said I didn't need resistors. (I took High School digital electronics, so I knew that resistors were usually used. So I made sure to check the docs.)
After that, I didn't get a response for the better part of the week. In frustration I posted to the Arcade Controls forum asking if anyone had any issues with Paradise in the past. A couple people said that they had, but calling them on the phone solved the problems quickly. (As an aside, most people had not had any issues.) I called and left a message asking for a status update on getting a new set of LEDs for that stick, and within an hour had an e-mail indicating that the LED was being shipped along with an apology for it taking so long to respond. Perhaps they were on vacation or something? Whatever it was, I did post back to the forum that the problem was resolved to my satisfaction, and I would be happy to order from them again. (As I am writing this after the control panel is all put together, I can safely say that I actually did order from them again. More on that in a later post.)
One thing that I thought was really cool about these sticks is the restrictor plate comes built in to them. As you can see in the image below, the plate fits three ways. The default way allows for fully 8-way movement. Flip it one way and the stick becomes a 4-way stick. Flip it the other way, and it appears to become a 2-way stick! (I didn't plan on using a 2-way stick, so I can't comment on how well that works.) As I was shopping for sticks, it seemed that most of them required the restrictor plate be purchased in addition to the stick, so this seemed like a pretty good value.
The sticks themselves seem to be pretty well built. I am FAR from an expert in this area, but they feel like they could easily handle the kind of moderate beating they are likely to get from guests at my house.
So, in short, I would recommend these sticks.
