Posted by Slim Jim on 22, 2000 at 12:43 PM:
In Reply to: One for the electronics wizards... posted by Slater on 22, 2000 at 10:27 AM:
One of the problems to overcome in daisy chaining a setup like that, is that you will have a voltage drop like you said. That, from your description, sounds like the most reasonable deduction. One of the drawbacks I've seen from trying to rig up a PowerAmp daisychain in the past, was the voltage problems. As all this is going into your keyboard port, with the extra circuitry you added (depending on wire resistance), even a small voltage drop can make a difference. I'm just going off of past experience, articles, and such to say this, and I may be totally off-track, because the voltage problems don't always show up with different wiring. Just troubleshoot it step by step starting with disconnecting your second controller and see if you have similar results as before with just the single. If it behaves irratically still, you might need to triple check connections, solder points, etc. If all else fails, and I personally reccomend this, is to perhaps spend the coin on the I-pac (40 bucks), or Hagstrom Interface (50-90 bucks). Use molex connectors for any connections you make splicing, etc. In the long run, the interface cards tend to solve the problem. I've seen a few instances where not only the voltage problems arise, but ghosting, and latency issues arise when using the hacked keyboard approach and trying to daisy-chain console/sidewinder/poweramp controllers.
(I'm not an expert, and don't claim to be and may be totally wrong :) .. Just making a deductive guess)
: Hi I hope someone can help me. (It's a little long to explain so I appreciate your time.)
: I've recently rigged up a Dreamcast arcade digital joystick to a keyboard by directly soldering to the PCB of the keyboard. It's an old keyboard with an actual PCB that can be easily soldered to (no plastic matrix as such). It was a godsend and very easy to do.
: The result worked perfectly. I decided that I wanted another Player two control panel mounted to my cocktail style cabinet to play "2 player cocktail" games. I also wanted to keep my Dreamcast controller for playing side by side games with my player one controller which is a 4 button digital joystick (mounted on the other side of the cocktail cabinet).
: (To clarify what I am doing - I wanted a cocktail cabinet with two hard mounted controllers - one on either side and then a "loose" controller that duplicates player two's controls that I can sit on my lap to play side by side two player games along side the player 1 hard mounted controls - Hope this makes sence)
: I wired a duplicate set of wires to the dreamcast connection on the keyboard PCB ready to be connected to my second controller set. I had this like this for a week unconnected while I waited for my second mounted control unit to arrive. Everything was still working fine even with the additional cables wired to the PCB (but obviously not connected to anything).
: I have since received and mounted my second controller and started connecting up my second set of cables. Suddenly some of the keys would no longer respond and now a select few don't work at all even when pressing them directly on the still intact keyboard.
: Is it possible that the combination of the cables are now to long? Has the voltage dropped and the controller reseting? Has the controller failed for some reason? Is there anything I'm doing wrong here?
: Remember this is an old keyboard with direct soldering points on a PCB for each key so I thought it wouldn't matter how many "switches" are wired directly to each key.
: I hope this makes sence and I hope someone can help me out as it took a long time to solder all the cables to the board!!
: PS: I've also checked and double checked all the solder connections and they are all clean, there are no shorts to be seen, and as I said it all seemed to work until I started connecting up the second controller.