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Monday, April 09, 2012

Assault

Assault is an amazingly fun (and difficult) overhead tank arcade game that has a distinctive style all its own.  The original vertical cabinet is pretty unique being noticeably thinner, with twin stick controls, making it a rare find outside of its native environment.

I wouldn't hesitate picking up an Assault cabinet if one were to pop up locally, but given the opportunity to buy the PCB alone (a Namco System 2 board), I considered it a challenge to see how it would play in one of my vertical candy cabinets.
Being a fan of dual playing certain vertical shmups, I'm rather comfortable using both player sticks simultaneously while pressing A and/or B buttons.  This got me thinking that playing Assault on a typical candy control panel shouldn't be that difficult given proper re-wiring of the controls.
Rather than re-wiring actual connectors under one of my control panels, I just created a little adapter to remap the right stick controls over to the Player 2 inputs, and then mapped the A button to both sides.  Since the original cabinet used 4-way sticks, I did have to adjust my Sanwa JLF-8YT restrictors to 4-way, which honestly I didn't even know was possible until I looked into it.
What we have left is the following control setup, which is probably faster/easier for making small adjustments in aiming than using the original grip joysticks.  It didn't take long to get used to this setup, where I primarily used P2's shoot button with my right pinky. Pulling the sticks apart to perform the bomb shot seemed almost too easy, in fact I kept accidentally doing this while trying to perform quick horizontal roll dodges...which is just a matter of me getting more practice with the game.

Overall I'm pretty happy with how this plays, but again, I'd prefer the overall vibe and feel of an original cabinet if one were to be found locally.

8 comments:

  1. Makes me want to mount my playstation twin stick flight controller on a cab and play some twin stick games. Great layout, great game.

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  2. I have one of those Playstation twinsticks, they are analog. But a Saturn or Dreamcast Virtual On stick should do the job. :)

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  3. Yeah, especially the dreamcast stick...I will only buy one locally if it comes up for sale. What can you do with the ps twinstick? Mine is just gathering dust (and mould)...

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  4. I haven't found a legitimate use for them yet either, but they are pretty hard to find now.

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  5. lukemorse1 (youtube) made it into a jurassic park arcade controller for the pcb which was novel. Twin player setup too, though the second player would be force to use the left hand (he he he). From memory, even mame/fba struggled to map it when using a ps1/2 to usb converter.

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  6. Love the 1P/2P twin stick setup! :D
    -ud

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  7. It certainly can, especially since you'd have to build your own jamma harness for Robotron anyway. I have also done this with Smash TV / Total Carnage on my Sega Astro City.

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