How to make arcade controls for a PC
Posted on April 25th, 2008by MastaG
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
Please note, if you are serious about building controllers or an arcade cabinet, the ultimate resource is ArcadeControls.com. I created these controllers several years ago, so this guide is out of date. For this blog post I essentially dug up the archived web page I created and converted it into a blog post. Contact me if you’d like some help / suggestions. Enjoy!
INTRO
These controllers are loosely based on Razoola’s from CPS2Shock (thanks Raz!). I hacked up 2 old Microsoft Sidewinder Gamepads (the ones with old school DA-15 game ports). I decided to use these specific gamepads for two reasons… the main one being that they are daisy-chainable (you can hook up to 4 to your computer just by plugging them into each other), the other being that they are extremely easy to hack… there are LABELED SOLDER JOINTS ON THE PCB!!! I ordered all of my parts from HappControls.com. Here are the parts I ordered:
Super Joystick - very similar to the Street Fighter II stick. Here are some other joysticks.
Competition push buttons - there are other style push buttons that might fit your specific needs better here
Identification tags - to mark your buttons if desired
Custom push buttons - I didn’t actually order any of these, but you might want them for yours
THE BOX
These pics are terribly out of scale. The measurements are in inches. The biggest mistake I made was making my boxes WAY to tall. I recommend you chop off as much as you can from the height of the box. If I were to make another set of controllers, I’ll design them at a slant.
For the button placing, I recommend 4.5 cm between the center of each button. It’s about the same as the HotRodSE. The lower left button should be about 3 cm down, and 4 cm to the left. Please note, I did not include the button hole size in this diagram because every button is different.
Start by removing all the screws on the bottom of the controller. You will need a very small Phillips screw driver for this. I recommend keeping the button-side down when you take the shell off. This way the buttons don’t go flying everywhere.
The first order of business will be to remove the tab that is holding the wire-harness down. It is connected to the side of where you hook more sidewinders up to. A simple twist/turn of it with a pair of needle nose pliers will shake it loose. below is a picture of the tab:
If you look on the sidewinder board, you will see it is very clearly labeled for soldering. The two pictures below indicate where you will be soldering (remember that all ground (negative) terminals will go to the same place, which you will learn about later on this page):
Buttons: The solder point marked “PR” is the M button, and the solder point marked “ST” is the Start button. I used the M button for for my coins. The other buttons are quite obvious… a = a, b = b…. etc.
D-Pad: The U, D, L, R solder points indicate Up, Down, Left, Right.
The wire I used to solder is called CAT5 (category 5) which is mainly used to make Ethernet cable. It is aka twisted pair because it has 4 pairs of twisted wires running in one casing (8 wires total). This is perfect because it keeps the inside of your controller nice and clean. Also, all the wires are color coded so they are very easy to keep track of.
Time to solder! If you are a newbie at soldering, you should visit this YouTube video:
The first thing to do before you start soldering is to decide what kind of buttons you’re going to have on the controller. If you want ones like mine, then you will need 9 buttons total and 4 directions (13 total solder points). I used the standard buttons as Street Fighter II controls, and the one on the bottom left is for NeoGeo which I wired to the BACK RIGHT button. Then I wired my coin button to the M button, and the start button to my start button.
There might be some blue gooey substance in the holes that you are going to stick your CAT5 through… just use the head of a sowing needle to poke that stuff through and get it out. In each CAT5 cable, you will see pairs of wires. I used the solid colors as my positive terminal, and later I wired all of the lighter colors to the same ground terminal. When you stick one of your solid colors through the place you will be soldering, you will see them pop out on the other side of the controller in the places shown below. Solder on this side. USE A FINE-TIPPED SOLDERING GUN AND EXTRA THIN SOLDER!!!
Now wire your ground terminals. It’s best to strip your ground wires really long so you can wire them all to the same place. I wired all mine to the already soldered BACK LEFT button. Below you can see a pic of my ugly soldering job with all the grounds tied together to the BACK LEFT ground wire (the back left ground is the red wire leading up into the bunch).
After you’re all done, you should have something that looks like this:
So now that you’re done, hook them up to your microswitches and see if they work! Use the configuration below to hook them up:
Now close up your box with some wood screws, and go play mame =]
Categories: Blog Entry, Video Games
