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| jptsetme:
I've wanted to build a MAME arcade machine for years, and my 5 year old son has recently become very interested in classic arcade games. I started looking for a cabinet and decided (perhaps impulsively) to buy a broken NFL Blitz 2000 Gold machine. No board, no monitor, but the cabinet is in decent condition and I'm told the joysticks and buttons all work. Now that I've done some more research, I see that this game uses 49 way optical joysticks, and it doesn't appear that there's a readily available way to connect these joysticks to a PC. The GP-Wiz49 controllers seem to have been unavailable for quite a while, and honestly I wouldn't be too eager to spend $140 on 4 controllers for these joysticks anyway. I don't really need these to be 49 way joysticks and I'm trying to figure out if there's a reason I couldn't wire them up as 8 way (or even 4 way) joysticks to a single I-PAC4 controller. I'm a software guy and haven't touched a breadboard since college many years ago -- can someone please help me understand if my thinking is flawed (either because it simply doesn't work that way or because it would not function well for some reason)? I'm thinking I could demultiplex the joystick output and simply OR together the groups of directions that should map to the 8 (or 4) discrete directions I want to support, and then send that output to the input on an I-PAC. The wiring diagram for the joysticks is on page 95 of the manual here: http://www.crazykong.com/manuals/NFLBlitz2KGold.man.pdf I'm hoping for advice like "yeah, you can convert these to 8-way or 4-way joystick outputs - that's been done before here's a link to some info", "yeah, you could do that (and maybe a bit of here's how I suggest you do it: DIY with a breadboard, Arduino, something else)", or "you're a moron, that won't work and here's why". Feel free to add the "you're a moron" part regardless. :-) Thanks for your help -- really looking forward to this project. |
| RetroACTIVE:
Unfortunately there is no quick and dirty solution to your quest. 49 ways are pretty unique and there really isn't a practical way to 'convert' them. IMHO, you'd be better off selling them and buying new sticks. |
| Damian:
I'm also a newbie and have no direct experience with 49-way sticks. However, I've done a bit of electronic tinkering in my time, and the manual does _seem_ to bear out what jpsetme said. I'd say the easiest thing is to rig them up to power and use a multimeter to verify what the manual seems to be telling you. If there really are a few wires that go high when you want them to, I don't really see why it couldn't work. RetroACTIVE, is there some electrical weirdness with these sticks? I mean, it looks like it's a simple +5V circuit, but I only know enough to get myself into trouble. ;D |
| RetroACTIVE:
--- Quote from: Damian on March 18, 2013, 04:01:42 pm ---I'm also a newbie and have no direct experience with 49-way sticks. However, I've done a bit of electronic tinkering in my time, and the manual does _seem_ to bear out what jpsetme said. I'd say the easiest thing is to rig them up to power and use a multimeter to verify what the manual seems to be telling you. If there really are a few wires that go high when you want them to, I don't really see why it couldn't work. RetroACTIVE, is there some electrical weirdness with these sticks? I mean, it looks like it's a simple +5V circuit, but I only know enough to get myself into trouble. ;D --- End quote --- No weirdness... just think if it as a 7x7 switch matrix. This might be what you guys are looking for: 49 Way Joystick Translation |
| DeLuSioNal29:
--- Quote from: RetroACTIVE on March 18, 2013, 02:09:28 pm ---IMHO, you'd be better off selling them and buying new sticks. --- End quote --- +1. You'd get a pretty penny for those and with that money you can purchase 8-way joys and a joystick encoder. D |
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