7 (or more) buttons per player with the 3/4 player adapter?

[damadczar]

Hey there.

I'm using the following control panel overlay on my MK2 cabinet, with an eye towards emulation.



Right now, I'm using a CPS-1 style kick harness to plus buttons 4,5,6 to the MK2 board (as it was designed to be plug-n-play in a 6-button SF cabinet).

Ideally, I'd have a kick harness with LP, Bottom BLOCK, LK, and RUN connected per player. This is 2 too many buttons for the regular ARPICADE kick harness.

My question is, would I be able to manufacture a harness (similar to the NBA Jam harness) that allowed me to have these additional 4 inputs per player and then re-assign these button inputs to something reasonable in MAME.

It seems like it should, but I'd like to verify before buying. I know in MAME I can re-define, and I know in FBA I can enable remapping and have custom files, as annoying as this is.

Just wanted to make sure this would work.

Thanks,
Steven

[gt7766c]

@dee2er is there a way to add two additional buttons on the standard setup? Maybe modifying the GPIO pins or harness?

[gt7766c]

Or add an ipac for just those two buttons and make sure there are no key conflicts

[dee2eR]

If you want extra dedicated buttons the 4 player adaptor is probably the way to go, though it's complete overkill for 2 extra buttons. The 4 player adaptor adds lots of extra inputs.

Some thing you may want to consider though is a 7 button panel without actually having 7 unique inputs. I have a cab with the buttons wired this way (4 on top row and 3 on bottom row):
123(4)
456

The top row, including b4 is wired to the JAMMA edge, so I can use a JAMMA NEO-GEO and have all 4 buttons in a row as intended. The bottom row is all wired to the kick harness (the cab has swappable kick harness') so Street Fighter will play properly with 3 top row buttons and 3 bottom row buttons. When I get out my Soul Calibur I end up with 3 attacks on the top row and block on the bottom row b4 to be used with the thumb as intended for that game. Using a RaspberryJAMMA technically the 2 different b4s are the same input as each other but it still allows you to comfortably play NEO-GEO on just the top row, or use the correct 6 buttons for CPS2 games etc. Not many games need 7 distinct buttons so you can probably get away with having one doubled up, plus doing it this way you won't need to re-setup the emulator inputs as much..

Another possibility is to use the 'test' and 'service' inputs to add an extra input for each player (at the expense of not having dedicated test and service buttons). With test and service buttons repurposed you can still use a keyboard to access those functions.

[damadczar]

I'd agree that if I were just doubling up a button somewhere, sure I could do that.

But I want the following Street Fighter, so 2 and 5 need to be individually addressable.

1 2 3
4 5 6

I need the following for MK. The two blocks could normally be doubled up, but not when playing street fighter.

HP B HK
LP B LK
R

Therefore, 7 unique button inputs is necessary. I like the idea of giving up a service switch of some kind, I guess. Are there any pins on the GPIO that are unused (I just need 2). I could use a GPIO adapter and wire to those could I not?

EDIT - Would have been better if the board supported 5 additional inputs per player instead of 3, like the J-pac did.

[dee2eR]

There are no unused GPIO left to do anything extra with, short of something like the 4 player adaptor (it replaces 2 inputs with GPIO expander chips).

You could wire it:
123
2456

This would give you a doubled up run button instead of the doubled up block button in MK3, it would still be normal for SF2. Otherwise, if you have to have dedicated inputs, repurpose test and service or use the 4 player adaptor add-on and have more extra inputs than you probably would ever want.

[Mackdaddi]

Hey. Noobie here, just getting to grips with arpicade, but I’ve solved this problem by using the “coin 2” and “service” inputs on the jamma harness for buttons 1P7 and 2P7, and then reconfiging the global
Inputs in the mame in-game GUI to use those as additional buttons. (I’m only using one coin input on my cab).

I’m actually disabling hotkeys entirely on my build because I want dedicated buttons for every action i’ll need (to keep the cab user friendly) so i’ve set the 2 extra buttons to escape and pause, but you could config them to whatever you want, including player shot buttons. I’ve kept the “test” input as a dedicated switch internally inside the cab as it’s useful to do input checking in case of problems, reconfigs, etc.