I'm putting together a poor man's mame setup using spare PC parts and items I find at garage/thrift stores (finding cheap items is part of the fun for me).
I now have a sega 6 button joystick (1627) that I've mentioned earlier, and I now own a Quickshot QS-128n. It is a 2 button joystick for the NES.
I've decided out of laziness that the easiest way to go is the parallel adapter interface so often talked about (hemphacker has mentioned it here). However, I have a few quick questions:
#1. Would I be better off not trying to pull power from the port and either adding an external power supply or pulling off an extra cable off the P/S? If so, are any diodes still necessary?
#2. Does anyone know if I can hook these two to the same parallel port interface or should I add a second port?
BTW. Had an eighties party this weekend so I made a temporary harness for the NES controller (took chances with no diodes). Everyone LOVED playing Ms Pacman, Pacman, centipede, etc.
Thanks!
I'm fairly certain you'd need two ports. And about the power suply, I've done it both ways. I'd just run it off the power on the port, and if it doesn't work for some reason then attempt the external power. I've run these interfaces off laptop ports without having to have an external power suply.
Look at the schematic again/find a new one, because you can put 4 controllers on one port, you just need to wire the signal wire to a different pin, yet again I dont remember which one you change so look again to find it.
You can't mix multiple controller types with the parallel port interface, but you can do multiple NES controllers using Lizard's method. You could always build up both and swap them back and forth, but I wouldn't like that.
If I remember right the Atari/Genesis to parallel diagram takes all or almost all inputs to make. Meaning you'll probably have to have another parallel port. Though, SNESKey would let you mix and match controller types, I guess the newer drivers don't let you do that (and they don't have Four Score support either).