Rewire of 4 player panel - any problems with my plan of action?

[Noel Plum]

Hi there,

Posting here in the hope people with more expertise than me could look over my plans to reconfigure my control panel and just let me know if I am on the right track.

Overall goal: Rewire my panel so that it can be used to play modern fighting games without proper 2 player keyboard support (street fighter v and soul calibur VI via pc/steam) as well as maintain compatibility with MAME/Hyperspin.

My present setup is a 4-player panel, players 1 and 2 with six buttons and players 3 and 4 with 4 buttons. The panel also has a trackball and the four typical control/setup buttons.
The panel is wired via two minipac's, one for players 1 and 3 (plus power to illuminate the trackball) and the other for players 2 and 4 plus the four control buttons.

My plan is the following:
1) Disconnect players 1 and 2 from their respective minipacs
2) Wire players 1 and 2 to an ipac2 and use two Ultimarc Paclinks to output them as two xbox360/xinput controllers.
3) Retain players 3 and 4 on their respective minipac's, along with the control buttons and power for the trackball illumination.
4) wire up a couple of mouse buttons to the front edge of the panel (pretty much hidden under the front lip) to provide panel mouse input in win10 (using along with the trackball) and wire these into one of the remaining minipacs.

My hope is to provide compatibility for those modern games via the xinput simulated controllers but still keep things working for 4 player support for older games.


Any issues you would envisage with this? I have seen some Hyperspin videos showing how to configure xinput controllers but are the controllers stable on reboot in terms of ascertaining which side is player 1 versus player 2?