GRS USB Button Hole Spinner

I own two of these USB Buttonhole Spinners & a GRS A1Up Spinner (Asteroids replacement) so I think they’re good. Very pricey for Canadians though. $90 a pop at the end of the day with shipping & duty. The USB cable is about 15” in length so you may require a USB extender. It does come with 2 good quality arcade buttons (red & black) & wiring which would reach to a nearby Zero Delay Board (sold separately) is a nice feature.The buttonhole spinner is aptly named because it will fit into an existing arcade button hole so no drilling necessary but if you HAVE to drill a hole, a 1 1/8” step bit or Forstner bit is what you’ll need.Tried it on an iMac (MAME OSX) and Windows MAME and both were recognized (see below for Windows instructions) and both worked. I could not get OpenEmu on Mac to recognize it though. It was great getting to play Arkanoid, Tempest and Pole Position in MAME the way nature intended them to be played. Please note that the spinner is not intended as a replacement for Trackball games (Centipede, Golden Tee etc) as it only moves side to side. This USB Spinner also works very well with Atari Vault (Steam on Windows) which allowed me to play Pong, Warlords and Super Breakout the authentic way. Love it! FYI Pong is not emulated in MAME.The quality is top notch and it has a great weight & feel to it. To get the most out of this spinner, you need to set it up in MAME. If your spinner is not recognized you have to use a text edit program to do a VERY EASY little edit to the MAME.ini file BUT MAME doesn’t automatically produce a mame.ini file, so open MAME:* Select Configure Options and Then Save Configuration*MAME will then create the mame.ini file.*Open the file (with a text editing program like TextEdit or notepad) and scroll down to locate and change: “mouse 0” to “mouse 1”*Save*Spinner should now work in MAMENow to set it up properly for each spinner game, back in the day arcade spinners or arcade steering wheels had different turn counts. The turn count of the GRS buttonhole spinner is 1024. Google “Arcade Spinner Turn Count” and you’ll locate a wiki with the turn counts of arcade games like Arkanoid, Tempest, Pole Position etc. You just have to do simple math to find the correct turn count for each game in MAME, once you have the original arcade turn count.For example:Tempest*Arcade Turn count on Tempest is 72.*The GRS Spinner has a turn count of 1024* (Math) 72 X 100 = 7200, now divide by 1024 = 7.03 (round to 7 sensitivity)*In MAME press Tab, select ANALOG CONTROLS*Change P1 Dial Sensitivity to the number 7Arkanoid*Turn count is 486*GRS SPinner is 1024* (Math) 486 x 100 / 1024 = 47.4*Change dial sensitivity in MAME to 47With that extra information in your arsenal you’ll be able to use the GRS Buttonhole Spinner to its greatest potential.My biggest complaint with any GRS product is the documentation is either confusing, almost non- existent or both. This product came with zero documentation. Print the tutorial part of this review out stick it in the box Glen! Help your customers out!

Everything about this (except one thing I'll discuss below) is excellent. The spinner itself is nicely designed and has good weight to it, the supplied buttons are actually not bad at all (I am a leaf-switch kind of guy and I appreciate that these buttons aren't clicky), the supplied wiring harness is clearly labeled, even the packaging is top-notch.The supplied USB cable... laughably short. But this is clearly designed to be put in a cabinet/control panel, so for that use it is fine. I was going to put it in an old Atari paddle, so cable length was more important in my case. It isn't a very big deal, so I didn't mark off a star for this.I temporarily installed this in an old Samsung phone box (see pic) just to play with it until I figured out where I am going to permanently install it. Given its quality and its small footprint, I am seriously considering abandoning the Atari paddle mod and putting it right on my cabinet instead.

The media could not be loaded.  I installed the spinner and buttons in an old wooden cigar box. After drilling the 1 1/8 inch holes, installation of the spinner, buttons and wiring took 10 minutes. Perfect fit.I used a 6 foot USB 2.0 extension cord to extend the relatively short included cable.Unlike the original Tempest spinner which used a lightweight knob with a heavy flywheel beneath the panel, this unit relies upon a heavy aluminum knob for its mass. It heels very authentic. It seems to use ball bearings, a great improvement over the sleeve bearing of the Atari original.There is considerable disagreement about the pulses per rotation of this spinner. An accurate number is needed to properly calibrate sensitivity for each game in MAME. With MAME on the PC playing Tempest, a sensitivity setting of “9” gives the correct 5 lane per rotation sensitivity. Reversing the sensitivity formula, that means pulses per rotation is 72 * 100 / 9 = 800. Others have measured it at 780 ppr. 780 works well with the MAME scaling formula for Arkanoid and any game I have tried. The 4800 mentioned by the seller may be the native rotation of the encoder, but the USB interface provides only about 780 PPR. The PPR value is unaffected by Windows mouse pointer sensitivity settings.UPDATE: I tested the spinner in Windows 10 using a tool called "MouseTester v1.4". Using the data collection feature, one full rotation of the spinner provides exactly 775 counts, which agrees with others' testing and empirical results in MAME. Use 775 PPR for MAME on a PC with the default Microsoft mouse driver that is installed when the unit is plugged in.

This is the easiest to install and works like a champ for Tempest on MAME. Pop out a button on your MAME build and install the additional two buttons for left/right click and you are done. Nothing else needs to be said...

Let me get this out of the way - I love this spinner and you will too. Way better than any other solution I have used so far. It is smooth and perfect compliment to my arcade trackball for games like Tempest. The supplied buttons are nice and setup is simple - it is a mouse minus one axis. The packaging is really good. Now to the reason it does not get 5 stars - the spinner knob itself. Its weight is lovely, but mine was badly finished for such a premium product - the textured sides are covered in metal burrs and surface defects that "catch" on my fingertips. It feels "sharp" in many places, in particular the front "finger hole" and little things bug me - why is the grub screw hole offset at such an odd angle to the "finger hole" ? if it was on say the opposite side it would look better and the knob would be more balanced. Lastly - the encoder shaft is completely smooth with no cutout to align the grub screw and the shaft has some wobble if the spinner is not completely level on its panel giving a very slight procession when spun fast. I am a perfectionist, but this is a premium and specialised controller part, so I am fussy :)