UncleT's (Mom's Arcade) Dual Strike Hack
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One of the basic goals I had for this project was I wanted each of
the arcade controllers to be active all the time. I wanted the player
to be able to simply rotate the 6-sided panel assembly and choose which arcade
controller they wanted to use and have that arcade controller be ready for
gameplay. I did not want to have swappable panels or have the player do
anything particular to activate the chosen controller themselves. After
looking around on the web and discussing this topic in the BYOAC forums,
I learned that Microsoft Sidewinder USB Dual Strike gamepads were perfect for
hacking to arcade controllers which use 5K pots (like the ones I had) since the Dual Strike
controller uses 5K pots as well. The Dual Strike gamepad has one 5K pot
for Up/Down movement, a second 5K pot for Left/Right movement, a directional
pad for Up/Down/Left/Right movement and A,B,C,D,X,Y,LeftTrigger and
RightTrigger buttons. Basically, all I needed to do was take the wires connected to the 5K pot of my arcade controller and solder them to the Dual Strike PCB where a 5K pot on the gamepad is located (Hint: The Up/Down pot should be removed carefully to reveal nice solder points. The Right/Left pot has wires available for connection so no need to solder the PCB). I could then similarly connect all of my required pushbuttons to the Dual Strike PCB where the gamepad button solder points were located. Since the Dual Strike is a USB gamepad, I could have all my arcade controllers active at the same time by connecting all six of my USB Dual Strike gamepads simultaneously via a USB Hub. As a result, it was a very easy decision to go ahead and hack six Microsoft Dual Strike gamepads as the way of connecting my arcade controllers. I purchased all of my Dual Strike gamepads on Ebay (one at a time) for an average price including shipping of $11.60 (note that I actually bought 7 Dual Strikes total, since I decided it would be nice to have a spare). |