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 I created these controllers several years ago, so this guide is out of date.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

1 / 2 / 3 / 4 player buttons

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 =]

I know I haven’t done any comics in months. That will change… I’ve had some good comic ideas recently and I’ll be busting out the tablet soon. Promise!

In the meantime, click on the picture below to go vote for my LOLCAT:

this his hilarious!!!!!!!!!!!

This is awesome….

http://www.websurdity.com/2007/02/28/uncomfortable-questions-was-the-death-star-attack-an-inside-job/

I was pretty floored when I saw this drum solo for the first time…. I think I may have actually peed a little. Stevie is an incredible drummer. Several times throughout this solo Stevie bursts into raw death metal blast beats!!! Talk about a talented man

Link fixed… use this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SCZv7786KY

sorry about the lack of comics and Open Letters recently… both myself and the I. Hustla have been insanely sick. plus i’ll be studying for Vista (uhhhh i mean… bloated version of XP) certifications soon so fair warning in case weeks go by with no posts!

Text for the visually impaired:

comic title: The Birth, Evolution, and Death of Intellectual Property

1st frame: Birth in xxxx B.C.: dude with robes says “i have an idea but nobody else can use it”

2nd frame: 1436: the printing press is invented. the pope is calling it “black magic” (this is an actual quote because the church was afraid of losing control over their “religion”)

3rd frame: 1982: chairmen of the MPAA testifies to the house of representatives. jack valenti is quoted saying “i say to you that the VCR is to the american film producer and the american public, as the boston strangler is to the woman home alone” (actual quote)

4th frame: 2000: Napster explodes in popularity, Metallica wants to eat all their fans. Metallica is quoted saying “they’re all pirates i tells ya!”

5th frame: 2004: RIAA declares war on the consumer with warrantless civil lawsuits

6th frame: December 21, 2012: HUMANS EVOLVE. picture of two dudes talking. first dude says “dude i can totally read your mind! this is awesome!” second dude says “dude i can totally read your thoughts too! so i guess this is the end of ‘intellectual property’. hey… why are you thinking of me naked on a unicycle juggling hamsters on fire?”

Text for the visually impaired:
picture: two kids running away from Jesus, screaming and crying. Jesus has a hand puppet with blood all over it and a thought bubble saying “damn stigmata”

wow… this looks oddly familiar. ALL HAIL BEESUS… THE ONE TRUE SON OF GOD

Text for the visually impaired:
caption: beesus loves you
picture: jesus with a beard made of bees

He always threw the best parties…

Text for the visually impaired:
top caption: The Three Miracles of Saint Thug
picture: a saint with an angry look on his face, and a bling bling cross around his neck
lower caption: (the three miracles) oregano into weed, grape juice into “purple drank”, and salt into cocaine

Pure brutality from none other than Bert and Ernie! The music is by goregrind band Last Days Of Humanity, and the song is “A Divine Proclamation To End The Present Existence” from their 2006 release entitled “Putrefaction In Progress”… SICK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

O hai people who say “insure” instead of “ensure”! What exactly do you mean when you say “this new automated robotic packaging system will insure the delivery of our product on time for our vendors”? Are you proposing an insurance arrangement for the robotic packaging system? If so, you haven’t specified a deductible or percentage of the insured’s payment responsibility. You have overlooked many aspects of the insurance contract you have proposed.

It appears you failed 7th grade English. The bowels of our school systems have given fecal birth to your heinous literacy. Perhaps I’m being too harsh… maybe you’re still in 6th grade.

Also, for every time you say “for all intensive purposes” instead of the correct phrase “for all intents and purposes”, I’m going to defecate in the upper deck of your toilet.

Love,
MastaG

Open Letters are posted every Thursday morning. For more, click Open Letters under Categories on the right.

I was searching for a way to batch download an entire album from WebShots.com and I ran across several non-working plugins, and a few non-existent pages. With some tinkering I found out a simple way to batch download albums without a premium WebShots account. The catch is that you can only download 28 photos at a time (the max number per page that WebShots allows), so if you have more than a thousand photos to download and you’re pressed for time you may want to consider the premium membership, at least temporarily until you’re done leeching.

Required software:

FireFox v2.x

Download Them All! (FireFox plugin)

GreaseMonkey (FireFox plugin)

Thumbs2Links (GreaseMonkey script)

Now that you have all the above programs installed, go to your WebShots album, and click the 28 pics per page link that looks like this:

Now, at the bottom right of the screen you should see a link that says Get Direct Links!, click that shniz noz, and scroll to the very bottom of the page and you’ll see links begin to populate. Give it about 10 seconds to complete and it will look something like this (with 28 links total):

Now right click anywhere in the frame, and click DownLoadThemAll! When the DownLoadThemAll window appears, make a check next to Images, set yourself a download directory, and press Start

That’s it! Like I said, it sucks that you have to go to every page of the album to do this, but it’s better than right clicking each one to download them individually!!!

May you have many loud and smelly farts,
MastaG

PS: if you want to download videos, in the DownloadThemAll window just click Additional Filters and enter .flv then play the .flv files with something like Riva FLV Player, or any other flash video player.