megadrive to philips cdi controller

[InspecteurZ]

I recently bought a cdi, but it comes with a vcr-like remote controller. I can't find any "normal" three button controller, but I have seen some genesis to cdi adaptors. I'm guessing if it should be easy to convert a genesis pad to cdi with simple wire matching, or it needs some data conversion to work. I can't find any info about these pads, neither a pinout.

[kendrick]

I'm looking at my CDi controller here, and there are three action buttons and a D-pad. No start or select, and no shoulder buttons. I also know for a fact that button three just returns the on condition for both buttons one and two, so it's redundant and not useful. That there are eight pins on the connector leads me to believe that it's just six straight contact switches, like you would see on a Neo Geo or Atari 2600 controller.

I plan to open this thing up and see if I can find an encoder chip or something. Ping me here on the board if you haven't heard from me by Friday.

[InspecteurZ]

ok. Thanks!

[kendrick]

I revise my original assessment. This controller does have an encoder chip, as well as a tiny switch to handle autofire functions. The internal connector only has four wires, which suggests a serial connector. I dug up the pinout for the connector port from an old archive of the lost ICDIA website:

CD-i Player Serial Pinout Pin
1 not connected
2 RXD
3 TXD
4 DTR* (used as a power supply)
5 GND
6 CTS
7 RTS
8 +5V

Oh hey, here's some more useful links. There's a guy who sells a PC-to-CDi controller adapter, and he recently released some of his docs to the public. Looks like he uses a custom PIC in place of a standard encoder, but that would work for me. Link:

http://www.alpinecom.net/phackmann/cdiadapter/index.php

Most of the useful links regarding CDi functionality are found at the unofficial portal at http://cd-i.eigenstart.nl/ but a lot of the links are dead. Turn off scripts when you go surfing off of that page.

[InspecteurZ]

Thanks! I'll check that.