Posted by Matt(v) on September 26, 1999 at 04:45:05:
In Reply to: Anyone here build a switch for 1 panel to multiple machines? posted by Prophet of Retrogames on September 25, 1999 at 23:39:32:
Not sure If this is quite what you are asking but I'll do my best. I assume that you have a nice control panell with some buttons and a joystick and a series of interfaces right? Now when you want to swap it over from say PC to playstation you open the thing up, disconnect all the buttons and joystick from the PC interface (hacked keyboard or Encoder) And attach them all to your playstation interface, Plug it into your playstation and away you go.
Am I right so far? If not this next bit won't make much sense :-)
So I assume what you want to do is have the Pc and the Playsatation hardware inside the panel and the cords for both sticking out the back.
any kind of switching would have to go on between the pushbuttons/joystick and the control hardware.
One way to do this would be with a rotary switch, for those who don't know, (like me until a few minutes ago) a rotary switch is described by its "positions" and its "poles". For this particualar application you would need a rotary switch with as many positions as you had different kinds of controlers and as many poles as you had wires you wanted switched (two for each microswitch) So you would probably be looking at a 3 postion 20 pole rotary switch.
Hard to find in a store but you could easily pull appart a printer switch box and get one from there, I found an eight posiiton forty pole switch inside one which would work nicely if I ever had the patience to wire it up.
An alternitive solution would be to use a transistor in line with each wire, take the five volt line off the keyboard input and use that as your switching signal (better put some resistors in too :-). This would have the benefit of being auto switching but you could only have two different controlers via this method.
These are only Ideas to get you started, I considered the "switch problem" myself a while back and decided it was all to much like hard work :-) If you want more details I will post soem more later but its late and I'm tired right now.
Matt(v)
PS are you REALLY prophet of retrogames? You and dave are my emulation heros!