Posted by matt(v) on September 25, 1999 at 08:24:31:
In Reply to: Dreamcast controller posted by JD on September 24, 1999 at 15:12:46:
They use a couple of custom IC's (surface mount on the model I saw) and a whole pile of other bits and peices that I don't even know the names of. I'm pretty certain that there is no analogue signal sent to the dreamcast so my guess is that one of the IC's is for the digital output to the Dreamcast and the other is some kind of Digital/analogue converter for the Analogue stick and buttons (similair to the playstation Dual Shock).
I seriously doubt that what you want to do is possible and certainly not practical.
However if you were willing to sacrifice one of your gamepads you could use the "guts" as the basis of your panel. It would be a fairly trivial excercise to follow the traces and wire on your own buttons/joystick in the same way as you would hack a playstation or N64 pad. This still leaves you with the analogue inputs which would be un-trivial :-)
The pad I looked at had no descriptive markings on any of the analogue stick mechs, I don't know if they are off the shelf or custom parts but I would suspect the later. If you didn't mind ruining the pad you could unsolder the pots and possibly find an analogue arcade joystick (tokyo wars?) with a matching spec but once again you would still need to use the encoder built onto the pad to send the information to your dreamcast.
Sorry this isn't all that much help. The pad I was messing with was not mine and I didn't want to damage it, broken pad = no games. They are also way too expensive to even think about destroying one just to find out what makes 'em tick.
Summary: It would be not too hard to wire up the digital pad and digital buttons to microswitches and hence arcade controls if you were happy to gut the controler. If you want the analogue control as well you are pretty much out of luck.
Sorry I couldn't be of more help
Matt(v)