fusion_power said:
Really cool thing.
How are the Arcade Butons/Stick connected with the GP2X? Is there a simple 5-Minute-way for non-pro's like me?
I always wanted to build a 1:1 MAME Arcade Cab. ^_^
hmm yeah, I thought it was gonna be easy, but ah... things are never as simple as they first look
I originally was thinking of gutting my GP2X, making it a permanent internal fixture, so I opened it up and looked at soldering the arcade switches straight into the connectors on the board but OMG are they ridiculously small and fragile bits of circuit I'd have to solder to. waay beyond my capability.
then I thought of using an ultimarc mini-pac (wicked little device, check it on google). but actually I got it wrong above, I didn't use it. Can't remember why in the end, maybe it was software compatibility/configurability. yeah, I think it was a bit useless for navigating the front-end menus.
In the end I went for the this (deep breath...):
ingredients:
* a proper Sanwa clicky balltop arcade joystick, and a full set of clicky arcade buttons
* a cheapo USB game controller (like a nasty PC clone of a playstation gamepad)
* a GP2X breakout board (not the new cradle)
* a hundred bajillion bits of cable.
hardware:
1. gut the USB game controller, and just keep the innards - the PCB and USB connecting lead.
2. connect the arcade joystick and buttons to the solder-points on the gamepad PCB
3. connect the gamepad to the breakout-board USB connector
software:
1. front-end menu 'just works' because it thinks it's just a normal USB gamepad controller.
2. Mame *nearly* just works except that I had to configure the 'CREDIT' (select) and 'START' buttons. really great USB-controller support, thanks Franxis!
add several attempts to get the rotation correct (ie: the screen is vertical, but the joystick still needs to act how you would expect. damn the number of times I got left/right up/down transposed, or rotated the wrong way, by trial and error when I thought I had it perfect, lol.
the buttons just worked out neatly. There are two on the front (CREDIT and START), four on the top (the four main buttons), and then two shoulder buttons on the sides (pinball stylee), which you may just about be able to see in one of the pics. so you basically got all the buttons mapped except vol+/- and j-press.
I'm not saying it's totally elegant inside, but at least the thing works (at last. whew!)
the other thing was, I built the cab JUST big enough to put the GP2X inside, in position so it used the GP2X screen AS the screen (horizontal or vertical, rotatable). which seemed really cool. apart from two things: first, the screen was toooo small for the scale of the thing. plus the damn power cable sticking out the side just didn't fit whatever. So in the end I replaced it with a mini-tv, fed from the tv-out on the breakout box: appalling picture quality and I'm stuck with TATE mode, but bigger screen, who needs high-fidelity for space invaders, and its kinda more authentic arcade experience anyway, lol.
hmmm. I'm thinking maybe I should do a little photo-blog somewhere, showing the build process. I took stacks of pics while I was building it, so watch this space B)
