Arcade Joystick
So... back in November of 1999 I built an arcade-style joystick panel. Seemed like a good thing to do at the time. I ordered an Ultimate Joystick and some Ultimate Pushbuttons from Happ Controls. When those arrived, I found some wood, and purchased some Lexan, drill bits, screws, paint, blah, blah, blah, etc. Yeah.
After a few sketches it wasn’t too hard to pull it all together. Well, nearly all of it. I sort of hit a wall when it came to getting it finished. Everything was ready to go except for the electronics. I thought about hacking up some old joysticks, but the ones I had didn’t have enough buttons or the circuitry was too small for my mediocre soldering skills. I had no clue what I was doing, fried a few things, and basically gave up on it. I had other more pressing things to deal with.
Initial Sketch
Internal Layout
Finally...
A few years passed by (yeah, a few) and the panel had collected a lot of dust. I thought it might be time to actually finish it. I had looked at hacking a keyboard encoder instead of a joystick, so that’s where I thought I would pick this back up. However, there are a lot of issues related to using a keyboard and it just wasn’t looking like the end result would be worth the effort. Thankfully, I found some information online about a couple of devices designed specifically for what I was trying to do. It would have been great if they had been around back in 1999. Yeah...
Anyhow, I ordered a GP-Wiz Eco 32 USB interface from GroovyGameGear.com. It arrived a few days later and I had a fun evening of soldering. It didn’t take long to wrap everything up and my arcade-style joystick panel was finally functional.
Finished Joystick
What's next?
I’m starting to think that it would have been wise to get the Key-Wiz Eco 2 in order to support older DOS games or ones that only use the keyboard. That would give the joystick the ability to emulate key presses (up, down, space, enter, etc...) and be configurable if I needed to change things around for specific games.
At some point in the future, I might build another joystick. If that happens, I’ll probably go with fewer buttons, install the GP-Wiz Eco 32 in the new one, and then get a Key-Wiz Eco 2 for the older stick. Fun stuff. Well, for now I just have to find some games to play.
Copyright © 2001-2005, James Aswell. All Rights Reserved.
