Posted by Richard Ragon on October 04, 1999 at 14:06:16:
In Reply to: SUCCESS!! (Daisychaining KE24's) **READ** posted by Intensify on October 03, 1999 at 02:47:47:
: To anyone out there who was considering daisychaining 2 KE24's together, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND you do it. My arcade project has 4 controllers w/ 6 buttons each, and using the daisychained KE24's, I was able to give each important control (Directional controls and all buttons) a DISCRETE input, and I used a 4x4 matrix to deal with COIN INSERT and START (players 1-4) and my 3 control buttons (ESC, TAB, and `).
: This COMPLETELY ELIMINATES ghosting during gameplay. It may be expensive (~$200), but it was worth every penny.
: Just thought everyone should know.
: -- Intensify
I would like to elaborate on this also if I may. I had to read this a few times before I really understood what you did.. but here it goes.. What you did was basically set up 1 encoder to do all the Action inputs, and another encoder to handle all the maintenance inputs. .. At first I had thought that you had found away or Hagstrom solved the linkabilty problems, but I had to think about this a bit more... Although this is not really a fix for the problem, my hat goes off to you, as this sounds like a great solution to get around it.
At the moment HotRod too suffers from this same problem, and the reason at the moment we do not support linkabilty.. He's why without getting to technical.. Basically you have your keyboard on a bus transmitting data back going into the PC. The HotRod like most all keyboard emulators sits and waits for a moment when that bus is free so it can transmit codes to the PC which inputs are being pulled down. Each device that you put on this bus has to compete for time slices on this bus. Adding more than 2 devices, each device has to wait for the device transmitting before it can transmit. This is all done at such a fast pace, that its possible for codes necessary for release of inputs to get split up. This is why you get stuck buttons or ghosting in hooking up more then 2 devices on that bus.
By dedicating an encoder to handle action inputs, and another to handle maintenance inputs, you are decreasing the chance that the 2 will be competing on that bus at the same time.
Great idea though.. Thanks!
-Richard Ragon (HanaHo Games)