Posted by scott oberg on 4, 2000 at 3:29 PM:
In Reply to: Combining keyboard and joystick hacks posted by Mario D'Alessio on 3, 2000 at 1:18 PM:
I have a hacked gravis gamepad act as player 1 controls (joystick + 4 buttons), and I have a hacked kb for player 2 controls (joy+4 buttons) and 6 other switches (coin, tab, p1, p2 start, exc, and 1 "disposable", usually pause).
You could actually get many more buttons, but I was too lazy, and I don't play street fighter. ;) In the case where additional buttons are sometimes required (ie: a game that requires independent coin insertion for game continues, like the simpsons), I usually map the least used player button to act that way. I find that 99% of these games only use 2 'action' buttons anyways, so this has yet to be a huge issue.
for the most part, this is a grand total of 14 buttons on the kb hack, which leaves plenty of unique and non-competing combinations. I didn't bother even mapping specific buttons, save for esc, tab, #1, and #2. I just let whatever key combinations that weren't in conflict be whatever, and changed the mame mapping for the keys. In two instances, where there was overlap on one or the other matrix leads, I used these for up/down or left/right, since the joystick can't be in both positions simultaneously.
I notice no latency whatsoever, and there is no difference if I unplug either the KB hack or the joystick in framespeed. This is with a slower P233/64mb.
Total cost of my cabinet (former Phoenix/Qbert/Tetris): $300cdn.