CreatiVEmu Forum

Hey all. Clearly I can't leave well enough alone.
I've been making game controllers for other systems a lot recently. I successfully made new controllers for the ColecoVision, the Neo Geo AES, the Atari 8 bit family and the C64. (I also have a design for the CD32 that's just waiting on some components. I need to bundle up a big order with Mouser).



With all that experience under my belt, I thought about the CreatiVision solutions I had done in the past and it occurred to me that it really wouldn't be too hard to adapt the work done on the replacement membrane PCBs to be a workable standalone controller...

So I got to work on it. As large amounts were "cut'n'paste", and I'm much better at this stuff these days, it came together remarkably quickly.

The first decision was how to handle the directional pad. after thinking about it I realised it was just a conductive disk that pushes down onto a conductive surface. I designed a system that used rubber washers as the return mechanism and scribbled out a design.



It looked like I could make it so I proceeded to the design phase. It took a little while to get everything in place, but with a combination of CorelDRAW and KiCAD, it came out like this:



I still need to design the upper and lower laser cut panels, but to be honest, they'll be done after I have assembled the first prototype, and I can't afford a JLCPCB order this fortnight

Once they are in my hot sweaty hands, I'll give them a test and let you all know how they go.

Cheers!

Chesh

Hi, this looks great!!!!!!! Cheers, TOM:0)

Well, I have ordered the PCBs. Let's see how many mistakes I have made in THIS design, shall we?

Chesh

Well, I have made up a controller and boy did I make a mistake! Fairly sure I have the keypad backwards compared to the controller part. BAck to the drawing board... again

Chesh

So while looking to see if there is a "better" way to do things, I finally found that, yes, there are such things as Diode Arrays. Better yet, there's the BAS40DW-05, which is 2 pair of Schottky diodes arranged just right so I can use them to replace 4 diodes each.
That gives us only 12 diode arrays vs 46 diodes.

This is obviously a lot simpler to assemble, even factoring in the size of the arrays.
(By the way, here's a photo of the controller I mucked up. Pretty happy with the look.)

Still not entirely sure about that control. The 16 way joystick requirement makes things much more exciting.

Chesh

Great

Nice work!

Well, it's been a while. That version didn't work because I'd screwed up the circuit. I did another spin and... Well, I'd made some mistakes but it worked! There's a couple of switches I'd put in the wrong place, due to translation errors, but I've got a third spin already designed up.
The dodgy disk for directionals has been replaced by a series of switches that simplified the design again.

One more spin and we'll be good to go
(I'll also do up a laser cuttable case design to match the PCB)

Cheers!

Chesh

OMG it looks so neat!! I am looking forward to seeing a video of the whole thing in action