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Questions about hacking a cheap dreamcast joystick
LsLSpamMatt:
Hiya,
A buddy and I have gotten to the control panel stage of my cabinet. I've got the 4 player top cut out, base built, and yada yada. What I'm wondering is if it would be possible to dual-wire my panel for dreamcast and pc support. I have a cheap off-brand Dreamcast arcade stick. I opened it up and was checking out the wiring, and the thought of running a second wire off each microswitch and splicing it in place of the crappy off-brand buttons came to mind. I'll then just screw the encoder board from the joystick into my CP, and plug it into the Dreamcast.
My question revolves around the wiring of the buttons. The joysticks have actual microswitches that have a GND (COM) and a NC terminal. They 4 switches are wired in common and run to the GND on the circuit board. That's easy enough to transfer to my control. The buttons however, do not have clearly marked GND and NC terminals. They just have 2 plugs with a wire soldered to each, and run to the circuit board. For example, the wires from the "A" button will go to a "A" plug on the mother board, and the second will go to an "A-A" plug. I can't figure out how the buttons are grounded.
I guess my big question is, "Do buttons need to be grounded?"
Will it cause problems if they're not? Should I just hack away and see what happens?
Anyone with any experience or suggestions, please throw them this way.
Thanks,
Matt
Shape D.:
i've never tried hacking one of these but if your switches aren't connected to ground they wont work, they need a path for the current to flow, and the ground provides one of the paths for the current.
seanp:
I'm wiring up my first cabinet right now... I'll be running a MAME PC and a Dreamcast. I took apart two different controllers, and the easiest to hack is the Interact Quantum Fighter pad. It's even got two extra buttons that act as digital buttons instead of the analog triggers. I ordered two more off of Ebay for $10.
If you're going to use your existing control to hack, look at where the wires are soldered onto the gamepad. On my pad, the ground circuit path is connected to all the buttons, while the "hot" wires would only run to one of the buttons.
I'm only running a two player control panel, and decided to run the controls through a parallel switchbox to switch between the IPAC for the PC and the Sega controls for the dreamcast. Check out the "consoles" section - lots of good info there.
-Sean
LsLSpamMatt:
Shape D: thank you for answering the ground question.
SeanP: My joystick works like yours in that it has 2 digital buttosn instead of the triggers. I guess I'm going to attempt to hack it together.
My question to you is: Are you going to have the Dreamcast and PC plugged in at the same time? I'm not sure how to solve the problem of wiring it.
My thought is to just have 2 wires come off each NC terminal. One to the IPAC, one to the hacked DC controller.
There's no way that could go wrong I hope. haha!
seanp:
I read some old posts talking about doing what you are talking about, but needing diodes, etc. to limit the electricity from going places you didn't want it to. My electrical ability isn't that advanced - I can hook point A to point B, but I'm not designing circuits. So I went with the parallel cables and a switch box. It works great!
-Sean
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