I love arcade games. There’s nothing like going to a seaside town and listening to loud, obnoxious classics through the speakers blaring. For some it can be hell to play on machines that everyone has abused for years, but for me it’s my childhood. About five years ago, I had a lofty goal of bringing these arcade classics to my gaming PC, but only if I could play them more or less as intended.
For FPS on rails I need a light pistol; for racing game wheel; and for fighting games, an arcade joystick. At the beginning of the project, I had three classic arcade games that I wanted to customize the devices for. These were Street Fighter III: Third Strike, Sega Rally Championship, and any House of the Dead series. However, my scope has now expanded to four, and the other game is Time Crisis. The main problem was that I wanted to use official ports designed to run on my gaming PC or use officially re-released versions of classic games before resorting to emulating the original arcade games.
My first purchase was several years ago and it was a Razer Panthera arcade joystick. I was lucky enough to spend a lot of time testing arcade joysticks months ago with rental units, but this is the one that fits me. It’s the easiest device to set up of the four as it’s all plug and play, there’s even a switch that makes it PlayStation 3 compatible if I want to use it there.
The main advantage of this Fight Stick was that if you broke the buttons or pulled the Stick too hard, you could repair the broken parts by opening them up and using the included tools to replace them with standard Sanwa parts. So far I haven’t needed to replace any of them, but unfortunately this fighting stick has since been discontinued. I also don’t see any mention of the successor to it, the Razer Panthera Evo, outside of a few pages on the site. If you want my recommendation for a Fight Stick, the Nacon Daija and Mad Catz Ego use similar, high-quality Sanwa parts and work well on gaming PCs, though broken parts are a bit more difficult to replace.
The only persistent problem I have with this Fight Stick is that most games do not have the ability to manually change the game icons. To their credit, Capcom recently started doing this with games like Monster Hunter Rise, but not with their retro collections. fighting games It takes a bit of learning to remember that the X button on the Xbox controller is the square button on the PlayStation pad. I briefly resorted to stickers to remind me of Xbox buttons when navigating the menus in Mortal Kombat 11. However, I soon completed my first key objective game, Street Fighter III: Third Strike, as it’s officially available in Street Fighter 30th Anniversary. . Collection. The arcade joystick works here and with more modern games with minimal effort.
My biggest difficulties come from small arms. Until a few years ago, it was impossible to get them to work on LCD or OLED screens. Everything changed when the Sinden light pistol hit the market. The gun comes in two variants, $105/£90 for the base model and $160/£140 if you want the blowback feature. As a fan of Light Gun games, I wanted to support one of them as soon as possible, so I went with a recoilless rifle. It uses the camera on the end of the device as a webcam source and to emulate a mouse, so when it’s active the cursor will follow the screen and to be honest it’s a miracle. The gun has a decent build quality, with fully customizable buttons and a wired USB connector for lossless connectivity.
Sometimes I have trouble getting the light gun to work properly because my setup has two LCD screens and two decorative square artwork above them. The gun gets confused sometimes thinking these images are just screens so I have to rotate them so I don’t confuse the light gun camera. Also, the settings menu is somewhat complex and it was necessary to watch some YouTube videos from external sources to work out the calibration issues. However, after applying a white border around the screen, it quickly blew up on my screen like I was in a slot machine.
Sinden’s accompanying arcade pedal came separately, for which a big thanks to Sinden. It costs $250 / £200 for one or $475 / £380 for a set of two. Essentially, these pedals mimic pressing a single button on a keyboard. This chunky pedal is easy to set up, especially when running arcade versions of Time Crisis via emulators like MAME. One is enough for me since I’m only interested in the first Time Crisis games, but two pedals are necessary if you want to play the next few episodes in single player mode. At least it’s more justified as a luxury purchase if it really emulates an old-school arcade feel, and after trying it out myself, I couldn’t go back.
The Sinden light gun needs a bit more work than I expected to play nice with House of the Dead Remake. However, the original House of the Dead arcade game works fine with the Sega Model 2 arcade game emulator, which is handy because I’ll need it for the games that work with the wheel. The PC ports of the second and third games are also easy to find on Archive.org and don’t require many stories to set up with the Sinden Light Gun, although I did have to install a special program to get House of the Dead. 2 works. swap screens. Since the gun doesn’t work with PS3 and House of the Dead 4 and Scarlet Dawn aren’t available on PC, I haven’t had any luck on that front.
Finally, let’s talk about the last one, the Thrustmaster T128. This wheel is a mid-range option that costs around $200 / £170 and comes with PlayStation and Xbox buttons. I should point out that Thrustmaster kindly provided my Thrustmaster T128 with an Xbox setup. This is my first steering wheel device. most easy to set up, although i wish the pedal cord was about a meter longer to help me manage the cords and make sure the device reached my feet.
The build quality of the steering wheel is excellent, with plenty of buttons that I can assign to change gears, change views, or whatever else I need. It doesn’t have a manual stick shifter, instead it uses paddle shifters, but that’s fine for most arcade racers. I can assign the paddles to 1st and 2nd gear, and the adjacent red buttons can be 3rd and 4th gear. In more modern games like Forza Horizon 5, I can switch gears with both paddles, as originally intended. The steering wheel’s force feedback helps with immersion, especially when driving on gravel in Forza Horizon 5. Even when emulating games like Sega Rally, it still provides a little boost to mimic how the original arcade machines work. It’s so well done that I had the guts to throw it around corners, turning the wheel quickly and trying desperately to stay on track.
I had to refer to the manual when I figured out how to attach the wheel to my desk because I had no idea how the clamp worked, but their instructions are well written. My only unresolved issue is that the pedal won’t stay put. It’s durable, sure, but it slides on my admittedly thin mat like it’s trying to play on a roller rink. I think it would be worse if it had a wooden floor. It has rubber soles on each of the four corners, but I find they don’t do much.
I got lucky when I found a PC copy of the original Sega Rally. It’s pretty much the same as the Sega Saturn version that works fine on Windows 10. I couldn’t get the port to work with the wheel though, as it checks for old devices that don’t exist anymore. Instead, I decided to bite the bullet and download it for the same dedicated Sega Model 2 emulator that I use to play the original House of the Dead. To my delight, the wheel is instantly compatible without interfering with my Sinden light gun setup, since the control inputs are game-specific. watching the Val number go up and down as I pedal while still in the settings menu.
Of course, my search for a complete arcade conversion is not over. I still think my next goal will be a good flight controller to kick off the Star Wars trilogy of games (the one where you use the flight controller to fight Darth Vader in a lightsaber duel), but that’s a long way off. . For now, though, I’m happy to be able to play these retro games using the peripherals as intended, and despite the cost, it’s been a mostly pain-free ride. There’s never been a better time to relive the glory days of slot machines, and with a little help from well-designed peripherals, it shouldn’t cost a fortune or take up too much living space. .
Source : PC Gamesn
