Posted by stuckpixel on 16, 2000 at 1:18 AM:
In Reply to: cheap alternative. posted by charlie on 16, 2000 at 12:00 AM:
Charlie-
Hey, If you are looking for a cheap alternative, I would seriously consider going the way of the gamepads. How many players do you need? If you only need one, then you could buy a cheap 8 button pad at CompUSA for like 5 bucks and hack that. Otherwise, get yourself some Gamepad Pros. I'm not sure what you mean by cheap.. but 20 bucks per controller really isn't that bad of a deal. Plus it'll give you some good experience/practice with a soldering iron. (and if you don't have one, you can pick one up for like 10 bucks at Radio Shack)
Basically, you could try to do this with a hacked keyboard, but you are going to have to deal with ghosting and all those nasty issues. If you hack up some joypads, It'll be a bit more expensive than hacking a keyboard, but that price will pay off in playablilty. Really, if you think about it, two gamepad pros would give you 2 sets of directional pads (for joysticks) 4 start/select buttons (for player start/coin) and 16 buttons. In all reality, you could probably make a three player rig with that, 3 joysticks with 4 buttons each.
Really, you have to look at it this way. Would you rather hack something together, and deal with problems.. or you could invest a bit more coin into it, and get a really great product. I have 2 gamepad pro's running in my arcade cab, they were probably the easiest part of the entire thing.
BTW, I looked at hacking a keyboard initally.. YUCK! I have some older keyboards with the microswitches and such, but it's a helluva lot easier to solder to contact points in a joypad then to solder to very very small contacts in a keyboard.
-stuckpixel-