Madden Football USB I/O

[Paladin]

I just picked up a Madden Football cabinet made by Global VR.  The game runs on a PC which was not included with the cab, but everything else was.  I made a web page with some pictures since I didn't find much of anything about it on the web. One of the cabinet parts I thought would be of interest to this group are the 2 Nytric Extreme USB control interface boards.

The control panel has four 49 way sticks with four buttons per player and four start buttons. The wiring for the controls is separated into P1/P2 and P3/P4, and the harnesses are identical.  It's a nice design as it makes a 2 or 4 player cabinet easy to build by just adding another harness.

The controls all go into a PCB labeled Nytric Extreme.  A web search turns up the company that made them, but I didn't find a pinout. The cards look PCI based although the edge connector is on the back side rather than the bottom. The card is powered by a standard PC power plug hooked to a switcher in the cab.  The card outputs via a standard USB cable to the PC.  I found mention of drivers, but didn't find the actual files.

I think I'll be tossing these up on eBay, but wanted to document it as I thought it was a pretty cool setup.

[brad808]

I'd be interested in finding drivers as well. My pga tour has the same card or extremely similar judging by the pictures. Might be able to pull the drivers out of Windows some how if someone can direct me. Could be an easy way for me to dual boot my pga with a mame setup without having two interfaces.

Sent from my Desire HD

[Paladin]

I wonder what would happen if I just plugged the USB into a Windows PC.  What are the chances that it would be recognized as a game pad even without drivers?

[brad808]

I wonder what would happen if I just plugged the USB into a Windows PC.  What are the chances that it would be recognized as a game pad even without drivers?

It doesn't show up as a game pad in Windows. Pga runs xp embedded and when I went into control panel it doesn't show up in there under game controller.

Sent from my Desire HD

[lilshawn]

it's pretty similar to the PGA card.

I did pop it into an XP machine a while back and believe it just installed an HID driver but nothing else.

i tried to see if it was maybe a keyboard was being emulated but no such luck.

i gave up after that, but i'll bet someone with some programming experience could write something up.

maybe contact someone at nytric and see if they can shed some light on it. perhaps even supplying the code needed for it to work since i imagine they don't even make the card anymore.