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Problems with a joypad hack for arcade controls

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Turnarcades:
:hissy:  Hi all.
I've nearly finally finished constructing my first proper MAME arcade cabinet, but I've encountered a problem with the controls interface I am using.

Basically, I've hard-wired the joysticks and buttons for both players into a couple of old PS1 joypads. That way (I figured) I would be able to just plug the controls straight into my playstation or into my PC (using the Super Joybox 5) without any problems. Unfortunately in practice, I have been unable to get the results I was after.

When plugging them into my PS2 or PS1, they are top-notch - the respnse time is instant, all 8-ways of the joystick work properly and multiple button-presses or rapid bashing cause absolutely no problems.

However, when I plug them into the joybox and then into my PC to play PC games or emulators, I find I am experiencing both ghosting (like a keyboard hack) and that there is a very slight delay when any input is made (directions or buttons). Also, rapid button pressing shows that certain presses just aren't 'registering'. For example, rapid-button moves int Street Fighter don't work properly, moves requiring fast movements like dragon punches etc. fail. The problem is twice as bad when playing in two-player mode.

Can anyone shed some light on this and let me know if they have experienced similar problems with joypad adaptors like the joybox, as it is getting very frustrating and I don't now want to have to completely re-do my controls. I don't remember it ever happening when I was using my actual controllers to play the games, although I may not have been looking for it at the time.

Maybe someone knows of a software issue or if a driver update is available? Someone help!!

hanelyp:
What kind of adaptor is joybox?
USB?  shouldn't need any special drivers unless you're running an older OS, or it's a flakey device.
Through the parallel port?  I'd suspect bad drivers.  Noisy data transfer might also cause simular symptoms.

What OS is your game PC running?  How are CPU and memory compared to game requirements?  Too slow a machine I wouldn't expect to produce ghosting, but might contribute to other mentioned problems.

(as for ghosting on a keyboard hack, it shouldn't happen if the hack was done properly.)

Turnarcades:
Yeah the Super Joybox 5 is rated as one of the best USB joypad adaptors for the PC. It's a 4-player adaptor (4 PS controllers can be plugged in to it, then it plugs into a single USB port).
After reading about problems with the USB interface elsewhere (saying that it can only register so many inputs etc.) I used to use two seperate single joypad adaptors before building my cabinet. I had heard that certain devices manage to get round this with the way they are built, and like I say I don't remember getting this when using the controllers before. After all, why would they bother having 4 players on one USB slot if it suffered from this problem?

I did used to run Windows 98 but since I upgraded to XP I couldn't be arsed to roll back. I know that a lot of emulators don't run as well on XP and I've noticed small pauses and sound glitches with MAME under XP, so perhaps that could be the problem, Just seems odd that I never noticed it before (if it was happening before) and that it is perfect when used on my Playstations. I'm confident my wiring is bang-on as I've tested a variety of Playstation games and they're all fine. Plus the lag and 'ghosting' does seem worse on certain emulators than others. For instance, Gens doesn't suffer too badly, whereas ZSNES and MAME both do.  :dizzy:  ???

Any further thoughts? I'm surprised no-one uses this device - it's very popular.

dougman:
Yup, I have the exact same issue.
I was using a SmartJoy Dual Plus from liksang.
The response is flaking, and impossible to use in fighting games.
When you do quarter circle or half circle sweeps, it will most often miss the diagonals. 

I tried it on 4 different controllers hacked.
I gave up and just bought a keyboard encoder.

Turnarcades:
 :angry: Oh crap. Sounds like my perfect plan was a little too perfect. You'd think with the added feature of extra controllers and support to run it in dance-mat mode, they'd have made it a bit more responsive. Unfortunately the reviews I'd heard raved about it and it definitely has the best build quality of them all. Might need to borrow my old adaptors back from my nephew and see if that suffers from the same problem.

Maybe individual adaptors might work better, maybe I'm being optimistic. Either way, I need an alternative solution. I didn't really want to have to fork out extra cash for an encoder though, else I might not have bothered wiring them into joypads in the first place. I've heard of people hacking regular usb controllers with no problems (that they've reported, anyway) so maybe I will go with that option, if anyone knows if this works well, of course....

Maybe I can still keep it wired as it is, and just bridge them off onto USB joypads or into an encoder?

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