Mini Street Fighter Alpha 3 Arcade

[falciase]

Hey guys-- been using this site for awhile now, but this is my first post.

I'm creating a miniature working Street Fighter Alpha 3 arcade cabinet utilizing a Game Boy Advance SP, the superb GBA port of Street Fighter Alpha 3, and some really small buttons and a neat tiny joystick I found.

As many of you probably know, the GBA SP has four main buttons-- A, B, L, and R. As many of you also probably know, Street Fighter needs 6 buttons, not 4. The GBA port of SFA3 gets around this by adding two more buttons by letting the player press a combination of two buttons for a fifth and sixth button. The default layout for the game is this:

A = strong punch
A+L = medium punch
L = weak punch
B = strong kick
B+R = medium kick
R = weak kick

This setup actually works pretty well once you get the hang of it. However, I am building a tiny SFA3 cabinet-- I want it to look like a real Street Fighter cabinet, not just a GBA in a fancy case.

I am trying to find out a way to wire up one button that actually activates two of the buttons on the GBA SP. The GBA, and I presume similar to most arcade wiring, in order to activate a button, has a button wired up with two wires-- one wire goes to the power, and one wire goes to the, I guess you could call, 'swich' portion-- when power is given to this 'switch,' the button press has been activated.

What I figured I could do, is wire up a mini arcade button with four wires instead of just two-- one pair of wires would go to one GBA button power/switch pair, and the other two wires would go to the other GBA button power/switch pair (although I have found the extra power is unnecessary (the GBA has a power source next to each button...). This works correctly. When I press the button, it successfully activates both B+R buttons (in this case).

The problem is this: Now, after the dual button is wired, when I try to wire up a button on either B or R, each time either one is pressed, it activates both B+R, because I presume that power is getting passed along the closed switch and essentially turns both B and R into the one combo button B+R...

My possible solution: I think what I'm going to try to do is add an integrated circuit "OR" gate before the power gets to the switch portions of the GBA... this way power will not flow between the buttons themselves-- the power will flow into the IC and from there into the output of the OR gate, which will only be wired to the switch portion...

Anyone have any recommendations/ideas/affirmations as to whether my idea will work? Any other ideas you guys might have? If necessary I can post some pictures... once I'm done I'll post some pictures... hopefully I will be able to find a way to wire up 6 buttons instead of 4... however, it's not the end of the world if I have to settle on 4 buttons for my mini SFA3 cabinet, but it would be sure nice to have 6 like the real deal...

Thanks for any help you guys can give!!
- Falciase