Hello there,
Sorry for randomly posting in your thread, but if I may, I'd like to ask a couple of questions.
Very brief background about myself, I own about 17 JAMMA pcbs, started collecting in 1994, mostly scrolling beat-em-ups. I did have a Toobin' cabinet at one point but a few years later sold it.
I'm looking for the name of the buttons and perhaps the joystick used in ye old Electrcoins Xenon as surprisingly I am finding this quite difficult.
The buttons I see in this picture
Going to clean up the joystick fixing bolts for this panel and then done. Cleaned down all the leaf switches as reseated. Respirated the coin and credit display panel and the top section of metal work .Also added some nos marquees my friend in LA got hold of Top xenon speaker panel
www.ukvac.com
(Sorry...My OCD wants me to say the red button should be on the left and blue on the right, green on the top, basically the NeoGeo order but without yellow)
So long story short, I want to mod an arcade stick for my PlayStation and looking into buying parts. I emigrated from the UK to Japan some years ago and I actually live near some shops In Akihabara Tokyo, which sell arcade machine parts.
I went through their entire catalogue and pushed a ton of buttons and waggled a ton of sticks, so to speak.
NONE of them felt anything remotely like the silky touch of the cabinets I played in my youth and yearly visits to Vauxhall Holiday Park in Great Yarmouth where they had all these lovely Electrocoin Goliath and especially the Electrocoin Xenon cabinets. The touch of the cabinets, the red joysticks and the buttons. Suffice to say I felt a great sense of joy reading though some of the posts and seeing all the photos.
Looking briefly through a few topics here. I did notice in Flyback2021's post and the Neo Geo cabinets, which other than the yellow button seems to use similar parts.
I'm sure you're familiar with but in Japan they go crazy for these Sanwa buttons and the like, which feel more like touch buttons and push buttons (you can gently rest your finger on and they trigger)
They're flat and very thin and in my opinion, they feel pretty tacky if I'm being honest. They don't sell proper arcade buttons at all, in my opinion of course.
So far, the nearest I have been able to find is what I have learned are called "Leaf" switches.
High-Performance Arcade Pushbuttons with integral minature gold-plated leaf switches Now Available Illuminated! Gold-plated contacts No tarnishing nor degradation results in no deterioration in response The contact leaves and the external connections are fully gold plated
www.ultimarc.com
These buttons are concave and slightly thin. I don't mind these ones actually, probably my second favourite and the most common arcade button I remember growing up (I recall these being popular in the Mortal Kombat cabinets)
The Electrocoin Xenon concave ones are much thicker and pop out almost twice as much.
Now the Electrocoins Xenon and Neo Geo cabinet on this site, these ones looks the real deal! Even the Neo Geo has the red joystick! That's the joystick I remember with its trademark 4 screws at each corner bursting out on top of the decal (Interesting design choice that)
...but then I saw the underside of these buttons on a separate photo and they are clicky clicky microswitched!
The ones in Great Yarmouth were silent buttons (and silent joystick too) with a button press feel that I have till this day never managed to replicate ever since... well certainly not in any Japanese arcade anyway (been here nearly 20 years while my PCBs are in storage, hope they all still work after all this...)
I suspect the switches are probably something like this
GroovyGameGear X-Leaf™ True Leaf-Switch for Microswitch Pushbuttons [XLEAFK007] - The X-Leaf™ true leaf-switch is a special leaf switch for use with buttons which normally use microswitches. They are an instant upgrade everyone needs to at least have on their primary firing buttons. And if you...
groovygamegear.com
Although I have yet to confirm this, likely anyone who bought these 40+ year old cabinets has replaced the old switch types with new ones (such as the microswitches in the photo I discovered)
Anyway sorry this post got a bit long, and rambly.
PS This is how my stick looks so far by the way, I designed the underlay myself, trying to go for a Xenon theme, but it looks quite poor though, it's printed out on paper and the color contrast is very pale, didn't look the same as on my PC monitor, plus I'm not a great artist.

