Posted by Jeoff Krontz on 16, 2000 at 2:08 PM:
I'm finishing up a MAME cabinet and wanted a way to switch between 4 and 8 way joysticks with the press of a button.
The idea I've come up with is to have a small PCB with one device (a programmable logic device). I'm thinking of a 22V10 part. You'd wire all the joystick control signals into it.
In 8-way mode, it would just be in a pass-through mode.
In 4-way mode, it would look for diagonals and mask them out. In other words, if it sees a diagonal, it would simulate NO direction (which it really what a 4-way joystick does anyway). A fancier mechanisam would be for diagonals to continue to simulate the direction they were in before the diagonal, and simply switch to a new direction only after the diagonal subsides.
Has anyone tried this? It seems very easy to do, it's just a matter of spending an hour or so on the design. It might need to be different depending on if you are using an encoder or a keyboard hack.
I could post directions and the only hard part would be to program up the PLD since most people don't have access to that type of equipment. I would be willing to do that for people if they'd pay shipping.
Please let me know what you think and if anyone has attempted this before. I've read all of the cabinet example pages on this site and arcade@home and haven't seen any mention of this.
Thanks,
Jeoff Krontz