Weekend Warrior: Building a Custom Controller

[Jookie]

(Mods...if this is in the wrong spot, please move it, or let me know and I'll move it)

Inspired by this topic on dream controllers I finally motivated myself to start building my own.  I generally don't have too much time during the week, so progress is made weekend warrior style.

Up until now I had 3 options for controlling games via BigBox:

1. Wires Xbox 360 controller - this thing just works.  In many arcade games I can approximate most controls decently, but some games require a LOT of tinkering with to play well.  For console games, this is generally my go to.
2. MadCatz Street Fighter TE2 fightstick - Got this ages ago and it's great for fighters and generally any 8-way stick + buttons game.
3. Wireless Keyboard - Mostly used in the odd ball rhythm games that need 9 buttons in a line or some craziness.  It's not great, but it works in a pinch.

My setup is to sit back on the couch to play, so the fight stick form factor works well for me.  Some games did not play very well with the fightstick (most 4-way stick games like Dig Dug, etc), and while the 360 controller was fine... I wanted something better.

One amazon purchase later, I had a simple kit of 2x 8-way sticks (Semitsu style clones I believe).  8x 28mm red led buttons, 8x 28mm blue led buttons, 2x 24mm red led buttons,  2x 24mm blue led buttons, 2 USB zero-delay encoder cards, and all the wires I can shake a stick at.

If folks are interested I can go deeper into my build prep, but I'll keep it short-ish for now.  Basically I used a cardboard box I had around the house that had a decent size and shape and started with this layout from slagcoin.com.  I then added the 2nd joystick on the right side (oh yes...Robotron 2049).  Lastly I added the 24mm buttons along the top for 'player 1' coin and start as well as a mame pause and exit button for now.

At the moment I have the left stick set up as a 4-way as I really wanted to see if it made a difference in the 4-way games.  Oh man, it's great.  Compared to an 8-way I felt like I had much tighter controls.  Unfortunately the restrictor plate isn't as easy to use as some sticks, so in the final build I expect to change to sticks that are easier to swap between 4-way and 8-way.  Still for now it's fine.

Initial placement of the sticks and main gameplay buttons.  Pardon my color selection, I had limited choices

 

Inside the box before the wiring and the 4 smaller buttons were added.  The box was pretty sturdy with 2 layers of cardboard, but I still had to be careful cutting the button holes so close together.

First stick and the 12 buttons wired to the encoder board.  Each board supported 1 stick and 12 buttons max (along with a few other things like turbo and auto-fire which I didn't wire up for now).  I used the 2nd encoder board for the 2nd stick only.  I may augment this build with side buttons for other use (pinball most likely, but I could do save states or something crazy, but I wanted to try and keep it straightforward for now).  The cables for the stick and the buttons were not terribly long.  Luckily they were fairly stiff so the encoder doesn't really rattle around.  In the final build I'll need to mount the board better.  I popped a hole in the back for the usb cables.  It's not pretty, but works for now.

Here it is plugged in.  It looks much better in person than this photo.  Tried it out for a bit and I've got a few things to tweak (namely which button is #1-#8 which currently doesn't work comfortably), but I'm surprisingly pleased with how well it works currently.  The button tops can be popped off with a little effort if I want to put a label inside of the button.  Not sure if I'll do that or not.  It'd be great if there was a tiny LCD display in there that could be programmed...

I'll likely spend a few weeks trying this out before I change a lot.  So far it's been a lot of fun to tinker with this.  Future work/ideas (in no particular order):

- Acquiring and mounting spinners, trackballs, flight sticks, etc, but I need to do some more work to figure out what layouts I need for which games.  This will probably be done in a different build.  I've got the data, I just need to crunch some numbers first.
- Looking at other encoder boards to try and reduce the build to a single board.  1 USB cable is easier than 2 (especially when I have to plug the #1 cable in first to ensure stick 1 is "stick 1")
- Adding pinball buttons to the side for the appropriate games
- Cracking open my TE2 fight stick, as well as a couple others I'm picking up soon to see how moddable they might be.
- Investigate availability of RGB based buttons.  I'd prefer to light up the buttons for each game for easier setup and use the colors as originally used in the arcade.  At a minimum I'd like to turn off the buttons that are not in use.  Some software work also be needed, but I'm pretty sure that exists out there.  I just haven't looked yet.
- Looking to writing an add-on for LaunchBox/BigBox that allows me to set and display a 'recommended controller' value, and then populate that value via xml/dat/json etc.
 

 

Edited January 28, 2019 by Jookie

[onesojourner]

I really like where you are going with this. Can you go over the software setup you have had to do so far?

[Jookie]

Sure thing.  I'm still working on ordering some different parts that will make me want to change this up, but as far as software goes, it's pretty much plug and play.

When I attach this to my PC via USB, windows treats it as a normal XInput joystick.  So I can use the "Set up USB Game Controllers" control panel to test it out and make sure my joystick works and all the buttons work.  In my current setup, the 2nd stick requires a 2nd usb connection.  So I just have to make sure I plug in that usb cable 2nd in order for windows to make it "joystick 2".

For Mame/retroarch I have largely left the controls as the default as I set up my buttons such that it maps pretty close to what is used by default.  I did remap player 1 coin and player 1 start, along with pause and exit for now

 

[onesojourner]

You've inspired me. I have been reading about joysticks off and on all day.  I can't decide if I should go for name brand parts or just go generic. I will stick with that zeroday generic usb board though. I mostly enjoy 90's era games. I assume an 8 way stick is what I want?

[Jookie]

I went generic mostly because it was a lot cheaper and I wanted to play around with the parts.  Once you've figured out what your like/dislike, then you can consider going for better pieces if you want.

As far as 8way vs something else, it really does come down to the games themselves.  If you've already got your games working in launch box and you use a xbox/ps2 controller or something currently.  I'd recommend making a list of the games you'd really like to have a more authentic feel.  Most 8-way sticks have a plate on the bottom that will let you change to 4-way (or even 2 way in some cases), so it's not impossible to switch though on the cheap sticks it takes more than a few seconds.

If the games you're looking to play can be covered by a single 8-way stick and 6-8 buttons, you might want to compare the price of making it vs picking up a pre-built fight stick.  You can find cheap ones that won't cost much more than the materials you'd be getting for yourself or for more $$ you could get one with better hardware.  For instance, I love my TE2 stick from madcatz for a large set of games I play, but it's very bad at some of the 4-way games I like (and impossible to play twin stick games).

Now that being said, half of the fun (for me anyway) is tinkering with the hardware itself, so if you're interested in that aspect, I'd skip buying a pre-built fightstick.

My next parts purchase will be a spinner and trackball (and maybe another joystick or two of better quality), I just need to save a bit before pulling the trigger on it.