Micro 1P NEO-GEO Arcade Control Panel build

[Lingwendil]

Hello all, first post. 

I'm a handy guy, and do a lot of DIY electronics projects. While I'm planning a larger arcade clone build at some point, most of my arcade or classic console stuff takes place on a Raspberry Pi 3 on a small 13" CRT. I really like the setup, but I really hate mapping Neo Geo arcade controls to a SNES or Playstation type controller, so I decided to take a USB Nintendo 64 controller I never use and chop it up to be the brain in a miniature arcade control deck, with a few twists.

Principal changes-

Purple instead of red overlay- I happen to like purple so decided to have a little fun.
Compact size for single player use. To fit this I am using 16mm buttons, and found some on Amazon that have worked well for other projects for me in the past.
four individual buttons to simulate a D-pad layout, rather than an arcade stick. (my son does not like arcade sticks)
two extra buttons on the sides of the panel so I can do Gamenoy Advance or Super Nintendo with the controller as well.

Just attached a few pics of the panel art I am using, and of the buttons I choose. Also included an example of what my panel will look like fairly close when done from this thread-
https://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,120322.0.html

I laid out the buttons by hand last night to make up the D-pad layout on some 1/2" plywood, and will likely begin on drilling out the holes and countersinking the rear of the panel tomorrow. I was able to print out a few copies of the overlay that I adapted from the linked thread that should work great when scaled to the length of a standard 8 1/2 x 11" piece of paper- making the overlay/template come out to 10 7/16 x 4 1/4".

That's all for now, hopefully I'll take some progress pictures later tonight or tomorrow afternoon- I am still in the early stages of it now.

[Lingwendil]

Made some progress yesterday in my workshop.

It took me a couple attempts at counterboring the holes for the switches, as this plywood isn't the highest quality. It chipped out pretty bad when cutting the final hole for one of the buttons. I used a 1" and a 5/8" spade pit, after spot drilling a 3/32" hole to mark the location first.

The acyrilc was the most difficult part- the bit grabbed and shattered the first couple attempts, after this i began marking the template onto the acrylic the same as the plywood before drilling, and it worked much better.

[Lingwendil]

After all that, I started laying out the switches, and used some barrier/terminal strips to tie down the gutted controller wires to. Also some pics of the donor controller.

[Lingwendil]

Adter all this during a function check on my raspberry pi retropie I came up on a strange issue where with the analog joystick having been removed it kept acting as if it was being pressed. I was able to fix this by putting resistors in from the ground terminal to the output and from the output to Vdd on both the x and y axis inputs that original fed from the joystick. I used 3k each and this fixed the issue perfectly.

[javeryh]

Nice little project. How responsive are those buttons? They look small!

I like the purple - make it unique.   

[Lingwendil]

Pretty responsive- they feel a little stiff owing to their small size, I may see if I can open up one of the spares and swap out the springs.

[Mike A]

Have you tried playing games with those 4 buttons for directional control?

It does not seem like it will function like a D pad. A D pad is small enough to just roll your thumb over.

Vanguard has a button layout like that for shooting. It totally sucks.

I hope it works okay for you.

[Lingwendil]

Seems to work okay- similar to running the WASD layout on a computer keyboard so far.

I'm on hold right now while I get the plywood base together, hopefully I'll get some more done when I get back from being out of town this weekend.