Posted by AUX on 10, 2000 at 3:45 PM:
I was wondering what people thought of this: I've been thinking about a modular control panel (CP) design where joysticks, buttons, trackballs, and spinners would be interchangeable individually, as opposed to an all-in-one design, or even a design with several different control panels, like a fighting stick panel, trackball panel, etc.
What I envisioned was having a CP base installed with a keyboard interface, like an IPAC, and instead of one big SCSI or DB25 connector from the IPAC to the buttons and joysticks, have a set of smaller ones, each corresponding to a different control function.
Some would be for joysticks, others for buttons, others for trackballs and spinners devices.
Then, each module would consist of just a joystick, or a set of buttons, or a trackball, or a spinner. So for whatever game I wanted to play, I could just
put in the appropriate modules. This would make panels more flexible, and upgradeable.
I wouldn't have to build one huge panel for all the games you wanted to play, but I could start with 4 basic modules, 2 8-way joysticks and 2 sets of buttons.
I'd make it big enough for 4 player games, but I wouldn't have to have it set up for 4 players all the time.
If I wanted to add a 4-way ball-top joystick, I could just build that kind of module, swap an 8-way joy module for the 4-way module, and leave the buttons already in place.
I think this is better than putting a 4-way in the middle of a panel and above the other controls.
This design could also make it easy to switch between right-handed and left-handed configurations.
For trackball games, I could just replace the joystick module with a trackball module. Same for spinner games.
For Robotron, I could take out the buttons module and use two joystick right next to each other.
For 2 player Smash TV, I'd put four 8-ways in without having to worry about 6 buttons making the sticks wide apart.
For Ikari Warriors, take out the 'default' sticks and put in rotary joystick modules.
Tell me what you think, and if there's any problems you can anticipate.
One thing I wondered about is unplugging and plugging in modules while the PC is on-is that gonna cause problems?
Also, would the underside of the modules be too vulnerable to damage if I left them uncovered? I don't know if I'd be able to cover the bottoms of these modules and still make them small enough for this design to work.