Building a USB Controller/Adapter (digtal and analog)

[Gwydion]

I found a website that sells some USB controller stuff that may be of interest to some of the people here. They sell ICs and complete controller kits for building mouse, keyboard, analog joystick and generic I/O USB interfaces. Have a look at http://www.codemercs.com/E_index.html.

I am currently looking for a USB controller where I can hook at least 4 unmodified SNES pads. I know of the Super SmartJoy and Retrozone adapters but buying 4 of them is quite expensive and using 4 USB plugs is IMHO inconvenient. I would like to have a single USB adapter for 4 or more players. Maybe this can be done with the generic I/O controller offered by that site.

I hope this info is useful for somebody 

[Lilwolf]

I looked at their stuff a few years ago (for A-D for a light gun project).  But they didnt' have any reference boards at the time... and they looked like they where pushing their mouse chips more then their joysticks. 

Anyway, I put it off then gave up on the project...   But there is already a great AKI analog->digital that does everything theirs would do.  But their low end items might be perfect for you... but for a gamepad type controller... you could also use a barrier switch to a $20 keywiz... Save you some real time (unless your trying to get a resellable solution)

[Hoagie_one]

does it have to be USB.  There is an excellent diagram for hooking 5 snes pads up through a parallel port.  Works great.  I built one a month or so back.

Have to use windows though to use it for the drivers \ program to run it

[Gwydion]

@lilwol
Sorry, I didn't get that with the barrier switch. You mean it's possible to build an adapter with a keywiz? Is the "barrier switch" something that turns the serial button output of the pad into parallel data that can be used by the keywiz?

@hoagie_one
I am currently using the parallel port adapter. While it works under Linux like a charm, getting it to run on a WinXP SP2 was a real pain in the a**. I remember it working fine with DirectPad Pro under Win98, but under XP NTPad is unstable, PSXPad simply didn't work, only with PPJoy it's working now. But unlike some of the guys here I am not very confident that future PCs will still have a parallel port, so USB would be IMHO the better choice. And if it's HID compliant, no drivers would be needed.

[Lilwolf]

snes pads are all digital right?

couldn't you just hack the connections themself and wire them up to a keywiz?    You would need a new cord... but it shouldn't be all that hard to do.

Keywizs have a $20 controller with 28 (I think) connections.  How many buttons are you moving over.

I was trying to say that I thought these are better for analog->digital input.  We already have a ton of digital->digital...

[Gwydion]

Yes, a SNES pad is completely digital. But the pressed key information is transmitted on a serial line (from a shift register), not in parallel. To connect it to a keywiz I would have to bring back the information into parallel. AFAIK there is no keywiz that accepts serial button information. I thought the generic I/O solution from the vendor I mentioned above could do that.

Hacking it would mean soldering wires directly to the buttons of the pad. But I don't want to do this. First, because I still want to use them with my original SNES. Second, I would have to use a cable with at least 13 wires (12 buttons + ground). This cable would be very thick and unflexible. And third, it means lots of soldering, high chance of breaking my pads and I would need a special scredriver for the pads (I think its that special Nintendo screw) 

Of course I can live with my parallel port adapter for a while, but an USB solution would be just fancy