Posted by NThero on 17, 2000 at 11:43 PM:
Hey,
I built an 8 button arcade controller following Dave Johnson's "5 cent per joystick" design. I used the other two axes for the extra four buttons. It worked fine for a few days, then today it just stopped working. All of it. The gameport just doesn't seem to work anymore. I tried plugging my logitech gamepad into the gameport and that doesn't work either so I'm pretty sure it's the gameport and not the controllers. I tried the arcade controller on an older computer and it worked fine.
Actually, there were some other problems too, but I'm not sure I can attribute them to the same thing (it's possible--one of the problems was with the soundcard not working, though that might be something with safemode. haven't delt with safemode in a long time...) because I finally fixed those problems a little while ago... but the gameport still doesn't work.
The only thing I did yesterday that I didn't do before was play for a long time. Actually, I took breaks inbetween games, and the controller was plugged in the entire time, play or no, just like days before.
I used to leave my generic 8button gamepad plugged in all the time too--with no problems.
It crashed so bad, the power button on the cpu didn't even work... I had to turn off the "master" switch on the power center.
Sorry to hear about your monitor, Rich.
It seems that there are all kinds of casualties in this hobby...
NThero