Posted by CD_Vision on January 23, 2002 at 02:54:30:
In Reply to: Couple ?'s posted by David C on January 22, 2002 at 22:47:43:
I can tell you right out of the gates that without some type of switching device these can't be wired together. When you hack a gamepad, in order to initiate a button press or movement, what happens is that you short a hot connection to ground.
keyboards and encoders are different, where ALL of your connections are hot. If you tried to wire them up simultaneously, and you pushed a button, it would be as if you were pushing several keys down on your keyboard, because the ground circuit on your DC pad will touch every single switch, even if you wire them separately, since they are all one circuit on the pad, causing your keyboard to matrix every single one of them. The only exception to this rule, is for the I-Pac which uses a common ground connection. That may be your easiest way out.
: Thank you Agent Davis for your help. I just have a couple questions because I don't know too much about how inputs/grounds work.
: 1)What would happen if I Just connected the input "up" of the ke72 and the "up" of the dreamcast, the "down", etc.? Would there be a conflict?
: 2) Where would I connect the grounds? Into one of the inputs or just group them all together?
: 3) Is there a way to do it for 4 players because if u look at the pic of my cab in the post called "pic of cab" it's got 4 joysticks etc.
: Agent Davis, lemme say again that your reply was extremely helpful. Thank you
: : 1) Get an ABC db25 switchbox with female connectors (standard, male will work to but for ease of this tutorial we'll use female.) Note: Male refers to the cables with the pins coming out and female refers to the end with the holes (yeah, like the birds and the bees).
: : 2) Get 2 Male to Male (shameless *snicker* here) DB25 Cables and cut each in half. You should now have 4 cables with Male ends and 25 wires coming out of each cable. (Note: Your cable may only have 24 pins in which case the 25th is the metal frame of the cable with a bare wire in the group of 25.)
: : 3) Now, wire everything up. Use one db25 cable for each pair of controllers and for the KE72. Make sure you wire everything with the corresponding pin. I.E. If you wire pin 1 to Player 1 UP on the control panel then make sure you wire pin 1 to Player 1 UP on the PSX, DC, and KE72.
: : 4)After wiring is finished just plug into the switchbox and now you have a very simple way to switch between systems.
: : I am currently implementing this method into my cabinet.
: : Any further questions just ask.