Where to put 7th & 8th buttons?

[Adeptus]

I'm modding this:



It's a BattleStation II joystick, for NES/SNES/Sega/Atari/Commodore. Made with real arcade parts... niiice...
I'm going to wire it up to Playstation pad PCBs, then get adaptors for whatever system I want to use it on. (If anyone wants the old PCB, let me know...)

Questions:

1. For (digital-only) PSX use, it needs 2 more buttons (L2 & R2). Where should they go? Due to the shape of the panel, they can't go above the existing buttons, will have to go below. But where - both to the left, both to the right, 1 left & 1 right? Different for player 2?

2. If I wire it up with a digital-only PSX pad, will it work on PS2? I thought I read somewhere they need analog, or is that only certain games?

[AlanS17]

You could fit them underneath, but having 3 rows of buttons is gonna suck. They won't fit on the top or sides at all.

If I had to make any recommendation at all it would be to figure out a way to live with 6 buttons. Otherwise, find a different control panel.

[Tiger-Heli]

Could probably put them underneath, similar to X-Arcade.

http://www.x-arcade.com/two-player.shtml

[Timstuff]

Well, take a look at my control panel.



I think that this setup is ideal because each button is easily reached by one of your 5 fingers, and you can also get the "Neo Geo" setup with the bottom buttons.

[Fat_Trucker]

Sorry to pull you slightly off topic but there was a young fella called lemoe on here yesterday or the day before wanting help interfacing an N64 to a cab he'd just bought.
 
Don't know if you could help him out at all but if its suitable he might be interested in the pcb.

If not you might be able to get him started on how to go about doing what he wants to do as he seemed a bit confused about how to take the next step.

Re your button placement the only option I could see would be to swap out the joystickss for 2 button models (trigger and thumb) which would give you the additional 2 switches to configure all of your buttons. Not sure that a trigger stick would be suitable for a large proportion of console games though.

If you decide to add the extra 2 buttons your only other option is probably going to be to go underneath the existing button array but I don't think any configuration is going to look particularly pretty. Perhaps you could add a couple of small discrete buttons above/below the joystick, normal size arcade buttons will probably spoil the look of the panel.

[Adeptus]

Sorry to pull you slightly off topic but there was a young fella called lemoe on here yesterday or the day before wanting help interfacing an N64 to a cab he'd just bought.
 
Don't know if you could help him out at all but if its suitable he might be interested in the pcb.

Possible... I think I remember reading that the N64 uses the same controller protocol as NES & SNES, it just adds more buttons. If that's the case, and 6 buttons (plus start/select) & digital directions are all he needs, then this will do the trick.

Re your button placement the only option I could see would be to swap out the joystickss for 2 button models (trigger and thumb) which would give you the additional 2 switches to configure all of your buttons. Not sure that a trigger stick would be suitable for a large proportion of console games though.

I don't want to swap anything out, part of the idea of getting this was that I'd have (almost) everything I need already, and just need to change the interface. Looks like the sticks may be riveted in anyway (can't remember what it looks like from the inside, but the tops look like rivets).
So I'm either going to make do with 6 buttons, or go for something like the X-Arcade layout.