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USB vs. IPac for control wiring
PL1:
--- Quote from: Fursphere on November 25, 2013, 04:20:08 pm ---I keep coming back to this thought that the keyboard encoder is the wrong way to go today. Or at a minimum you really need both in your cabinet.
I-Pac for the admin buttons
A-Pac for the controller input (joystick + buttons)
--- End quote ---
I've been looking into eventually adapting the 2-axis analog KADESTICK firmware to make a composite USB device that has 4 admin keystrokes and the rest of the inputs are the same as the KADESTICK.
If we can figure that out, the ~$80 price tag for your proposed configuration drops to ~$15 per player. :cheers:
In the mean time, you can use the KADESTICK firmware on an ATMega32U4 AVR for the analog/gamepad and the KADE firmware on another AVR to handle the keyboard.
Scott
Fursphere:
Ultimately I'd like some way to flip back and forth between gamepad and keyboard intputs - but I haven't come up with a good way yet.
I knwo the UltraStik 360s + I-Pac is basically just this, but I'm not sure I want Ultrastiks (yet). I need to get off my arse and just order one to play with... but damn I'm lazy. :P
PL1:
What if there was a way to have gamepad outputs as the regular outputs (unshifted) and keyboard outputs as shifted outputs (using HWB on the KADE) or vice versa?
You could use a rocker or toggle switch on HWB to switch between regular and shifted outputs.
Scott
Gatsu:
I've got an older PS/2 Ipac that I've had for a few years now. I can just use that for the admin buttons & coin door and use 2 PS360 pcbs for the player controls. I've already got one so I can just order a second one for player 2. That way I can just unplug from the pc into whatever console I want in the cab pretty easily and quickly.
What particular admin buttons should I focus on? I don't want to have a ton of buttons on the control panel other than the 2 player starts and 16 player buttons.
BadMouth:
I like having a dedicated exit button instead of having to explain a button combo to people. ....and that's it for admin buttons!
Sometimes it would be nice to have a pause button, but I always end up leaving it off because it doesn't work for all emulators.
On my current build I did map a key combination to pause MAME, but I won't bother telling guests about it.
Because this build was arcade-only and broken down into gamelists by genre, I included dedicated buttons to switch gamelists.
Normally wouldn't do that. It's something unique to this cab. They also double as coin buttons if I don't feel like messing with quarters.
I also considered save/load buttons, but not all games support it, people wouldn't know how to use it, and it's not really how the arcade games were meant to be played. The exception being the Neo Geo memory card which is fully emulated in MAME. I might still work that in somehow since I'm building a Neo Geo themed cab, but would just use a key combo otherwise. Guests don't need to know about the feature.
Anything else is a one-time adjustment and can be handled with a wireless keyboard.