Amiga keyboard joystick

Ok, here You have some pics of pad. All work by my friend Bielin. If anyone want to built pad in this way (and need any help) feel free and welcome to write e-mail to Bielin (e-mail adress on pics). hope you like it

and more...

and more...

And here we have some tourturial written by bielin. More soon (pics and maybe some movie). Enjoy!

bielin.hador.pl/

Djowger, can you make some pics from inside? I mean the switches and pcb. It looks awsome from outside. Really great job!

Granted, It s no keypad however what has driven the choices I ve made design-wise was the gap I felt joystick players (such as myself) have always had toward Keyboard/Keypad users (who can use up to 4 fingers for directions - which means much faster, smaller and tighter movements - and generally don t have to deal with throw and engage distances since every input gets through pretty much instantly - you re clicking a button which is tigtly connected with a sort of microswitch after all) when it comes to responsiveness.

Let s take a look:



in action:

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The thing is heavy enough to sit steadily on my lap so I can now use both hands to play, one of the sticks aims whilst the other one quickly adds the aftertouch, a feature that shortens my input speed and improves greatly my accuracy. The sticks are also quite different from each other: the shorter one is great for quick movements such as dribblings (I also tend to use it a lot while defending) whereas the black one is perfect for long shots and headers, I could ve never achieved such versatilty with a single stick set-up.

6 months ago I knew very little about custom controllers, arcade parts and DIY in general (I ve always used stock controllers, the first stick I modded was my previous SWOS joystick which was a Thrustmaster Flightstick/Quickshot Apache hybrid, nothing too fancy though and used to fall apart every other day) so I had to put a lot of time into researching stuff, basically relied upon a trial and error approach the whole time and had to make a ton of experiments before achieving the right feeling (I ve actually badly damaged a Quickshot Apache handle and a Seimitsu LS-32 joystick in the process).

It was definitely worth every effort tho (and luckily I could use my dad s laboratory tools for cutting, painting and wiring stuff)!

The stick is Playstation 3/Windows and Amiga compatible (via USB and DB9 cables respectively), works better on Amiga though because the PCB that handles the PS3/PC compatibility adds some tiny lag which, albeit imperceptible for the most, was pretty noticeable to me.

That being said, I still nonetheless strongly believe that Keyboards/Keypads are the best all-around controllers for SWOS (closely followed by oldschool joypads), I just can t use them effectively (even though I ve tried, props to those who play with them) since I ve grown up as SWOS players with joysticks (the Quickshot Apache was my stick of choice back then), so I tried my best to come out with a different, out-of-the-box solution which would suit my playstyle and habits.

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If anybody wants to make something alike I m up for some tutoring, I got a lot of useful links, schematics, instructables and walkthroughs that would save you a truckload of time and money (it s still going to be really expensive though, the black joystick alone costs 110 Euro and only a handful of them get produced every year since they re spare parts for a rather old SEGA coin-op, Virtual On Oratorio Tangram , only collectors and crazy people like me would purchase lol).

EDIT: ...and this is another project I ve been working on as of late