Posted by Ohso on 12, 2000 at 2:06 AM:
In Reply to: Control panel wiring question posted by supermegagoon on 11, 2000 at 10:18 PM:
: I'm in the planning stage for my control panel, and need some advice on connections. The plan is to have minimum clutter with maximum flexibility. The current layout includes 2 eight way sticks with three buttons per player, a trackball and spinner, and a central 4 way stick with two buttons on each side to allow for right or lefthanded play. Unfortunatly, my wiring knowledge doesn't extend beyond high school electronics class.
: 1. Can the connections for the left 8 way stick (and buttons) be passed directly to the central 4 way? The two will never be used simultaneously and this would eliminate the need to reconfigure many of the games(just use mame default settings).
Yes, just wire the two sticks in parallel. Example: For the UP direction, just run one wire from your encoder or whatever you decide to use. Split this in two using a butt connector or something similar, and run one wire to the 8-way and one to the 4-way. Connect these to the appropriate UP switch on the joystick. You can do the same thing with the grounds, although you could hook up all your grounds to a single connection if you like.
: 2. In a similar fashion, could the two connections for the trackball buttons be wired to two of the three buttons next to the left side 8 way? This would close two circuits per button press, but again, they would never be used together.
I'm not sure what you want to do here, but it sounds like you want to have the buttons next to the 8-way also activate a mouse click. I'm not sure you can easily do this, but I'm not an electronics expert either. Do not simply hook the two together, as you have voltage coming from two different sources and I fear you would damage either your encoder or trackball interface.
: I know these questions may be simple, but I don't want to unwittingly commit an electronics blunder, and I don't want my panel to look like a set of space shuttle controls.