The NEW Build Your Own Arcade Controls
Arcade Collecting => Miscellaneous Arcade Talk => Topic started by: elevent on November 12, 2007, 04:49:32 pm
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I bought an old arcade box with two joysticks and 14 buttons. They were wired to two SNES controllers. How can I rewire the insides to connect them to USB connections to use with my cabinet? Thanks. :)
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A few possibilities: (assuming they are still set up with the snes plug-in ends.)
A) you could hack a pc usb gamepad or two as the case may be, and put them in place of the snes controllers.
B) Use a GPWiz or Ipac encoder.
C) Purchase a Snes-to-usb adaptor or two.
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I took the SNES ends off. The wires are all soldered to a board but that's no problem. Can you buy a cable that's USB on one end but wires on the other?
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Yes, take a something like a usb printer cable and cut it in half.
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Be aware that many USB printer cables (which often cost as much as a real commercial gamepad/keyboard/mouse encoder) do the USB to parallel conversion inside the giant "centronics" connector that plugs into the printer - the cable is just USB. You simply cannot just hook a button or two up to USB and expect it to do anything useful. USB just doesn't work that way. You can use a parallel port that way, and you can even use an old school RS-232 serial port that way, but USB doesn't work that way.
By far the easiest thing to do here is to buy a real encoder that does what you want. There are several good product lines out there, including the PAC series from Ultimarc and the Wiz series from GGG. There's plenty of documentation available, and they're actually designed for this usage.