Hacking a gameport

[SirPeale]

With all the gamepad hacks around here, I'm suprised no one has attempted to just connect the controls directly to the gameport itself.

http://www.ctips.com/game.html

More than enough information to do that.

Of course, you're limited to two controls with two buttons.  Less if you decide to use the buttons on the joys for credit buttons.

[zero-one]

Interesting....

Good for a simple Classics control panel with 2 joysticks, 2 buttons, Coin, and Start. You could play Robotron and most of the 1 and 2 button games. No Defender/Stargate though.

The circuit is easy to build on a perf-board also. Sweet.

[SirPoonga]

Yeah, in the old days of BYOAC that was done more often.  No need to now.  Plus the gameport is going bye bye.  Actually, it is possible to burn out your soundcard using the gameport on fast computers.

[cw]

I use the gameport of one of my cabs.....

mame driving cab  for the axis of the pedal and shifter and the coindrop.....

I could not get it to calibrate in win98 but 2000 and xp are ok with it(.....been looking for a cockpit pole
pedal that has the break and gas)...

[SirPeale]

If we could hack USB into DOS there wouldn't be any need.  Well, USB kinda works, but it's getting the device drivers, not the USB drivers to work, that's the tricky part.

Anyone that programs want to give it a shot?  I think porting over the Linux HID drivers to DOS would work - maybe.

[OzStick]

The standard for the gameport is 2 joysticks with a total of 4 buttons, but if you want to be a little creative you can actually get a config of 1 joystick and EIGHT buttons!

How? A joystick has 4 microswitches, so why not simply wire up 4 buttons to the same inputs as for the 2nd joystick instead??

If you are using an old version of MAME then this will work a treat. The code was changed, I think around v0.53, and support for Dual Joysticks was omitted.

Email me direct if you want any more info on this - we have done quite a few custom solutions via directly wiring to a joystick extension cable and it always works out well.

So to those of you who say you cannot have a Defender layout that connects entirely to the Gameport, I challenge you to simply think outside the square.......

You don't really need perforated board either- all you need is a few wires, 4 resistors, a soldering iron and the ability to read a simple circuit diagram.

[hooded_paladin]

How? A joystick has 4 microswitches, so why not simply wire up 4 buttons to the same inputs as for the 2nd joystick instead??

You can't wire two buttons to opposite ends of a joystick axis and not expect ghosting, right?  So you could get one joystick and 6 buttons

[OzStick]

Well, technically you can only get 6 buttons and a joystick before you run into possible conflict issues, but if you give it some thought you COULD work out a suitable layout where 8 buttons are workable.......

[Tiger-Heli]

How? A joystick has 4 microswitches, so why not simply wire up 4 buttons to the same inputs as for the 2nd joystick instead??

You can't wire two buttons to opposite ends of a joystick axis and not expect ghosting, right?  So you could get one joystick and 6 buttons

Wrong, ghosting is a problem with keyboard and maybe gamepad hacks where you have a scanning matrix coming into play.  Gameport is straight 4-axis and 4 buttons total, so no ghosting, AFAIK.