joystick with 8 switches?

[Cooljerk]

I'm building an atari jaguar joystick especially for total carnage. It uses the numeric keypad to allow you to rotate your character independent of walking direction. This makes for a particularly good port of the game, but the jaguar pad is terrible to hold. I'm trying to build a dual joystick setup where one moves the player and the other fires in the direction it's pressed.

Only problem is that the jaguar keypad won't check for two directions to make a diagonal. In other words, I can't press 2 (up) and 4 (left) to shoot up-left, I have to press 1 (up-left). This means your aim is controlled by 8 different buttons. I'm trying to find a joystick with actual diagonal microswitches but coming up short. Anybody know if such a joystick exists?

[yotsuya]

I've never seen one.

[Louis Tully]

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[JDFan]

IF it is a dedicated single game setup perhaps you could use buttons instead of a joystick and arrange them like the keypad.

Or if you use joytokey is there a way to run a script that inputs 2 if pressing down, 4 if pressing left, and 1 if both down and left are pressed etc.

EDIT : NInja'd by LT

[Louis Tully]

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[Cooljerk]

This is real hardware, an actual jaguar. I'd rather not use buttons. :-/

[Louis Tully]

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[bfauska]

The first ideas that pop into my head to do it mechanically with only the 4 switch type joystick would be if you could find dpdt switches to replace the standard spdt. I can't do a quick schematic just now but maybe dropping this idea into the mix will trigger some other thoughts.

[NickG]

yeah, like these?
http://www.ebay.com/itm/4-Cherry-D44-10A-Stainless-Lever-MicroSwitches-125V-250V-Double-Pole-A44L-RWAT-/291298608384
Even with these, you may still find it necessary to add some components. 
If the controller input lines just needs to be pulled high or low, you will probably be able to do this with 7400 or 7408, and AND or NAND the UDLR N.O or N.C. contacts pairs per diagonal.  You may have to also get the controller pcb to ignore the UDLR inputs during a diagonal. 
4066'es may be helpful here and would work even if you have separate grounds, etc on the jaguar pcb.   
 

[SavannahLion]

yeah, like these?
http://www.ebay.com/itm/4-Cherry-D44-10A-Stainless-Lever-MicroSwitches-125V-250V-Double-Pole-A44L-RWAT-/291298608384
Even with these, you may still find it necessary to add some components. 
If the controller input lines just needs to be pulled high or low, you will probably be able to do this with 7400 or 7408, and AND or NAND the UDLR N.O or N.C. contacts pairs per diagonal.  You may have to also get the controller pcb to ignore the UDLR inputs during a diagonal. 
4066'es may be helpful here and would work even if you have separate grounds, etc on the jaguar pcb.

I was going to suggest a straight up 74HC154 which will definitely get the behavior you want but I realized this was going into a Jaguar pad, not a keyboard encoder. Looking at the schematic for the Jaguar, it appears the joypad is made up of a scanning matix, rather ugly to hack into. So I would say use a 74HC154 with a pair of 74HC32 or a three 74HC154's, but that would be an intimidating solder job for a beginner. A *154 with 3 quad buffers would do the trick too, not sure which one would be used off the top of my head though.... Still soldering hell.

A pair of 3:8 demultiplexers and maybe a pair of OR gates might do the trick. Don't feel like looking those part numbers up right now though

Something like an Atmega or PIC would have absolutely no problem keeping up unless the strobe clock is insane. The wiring would certainly be manageable. It would have the added benefit at not chopping up a Jaguar controller necessarily either. But the programming of such a toy might scare a person though (don't use the crappy Arduino, you don't need all that overhead).

All of the solutions I tried to come up with in my head take care of handling with the UDLR  conditions correctly.