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.
