PSX Control Panel

I bought my wife a PlayStation 2 for driving games, and I got some classic arcade games- Williams Arcade's Greatest Hits with Defender, Defender II (Stargate), Robotron, Joust, Sinistar and Bubbles; Namco Museum with Pac Man, Ms Pac Man, Galaga, Dig Dug, Galaxian and Pole Position; and Atari Anniversary Edition Redux with Asteroids, Asteroids Deluxe, Battlezone, Black Widow, Centipede, Gravitar, Missile Command, Pong, Space Duel, Super Breakout, Tempest and Warlords.

The games are very good- most are emulated, so they are nearly exact copies of the originals. The major problem is the controls- most of the games don't play well on the standard hand controller, so I decided to build my own arcade-style panel.

I bought 2 joysticks and a bunch of buttons from Happ. I bought a $5 PSX controller from WalMart, opened it up and hooked up the buttons and joysticks.

Many of the games in Atari Anniversary can use a mouse, so I bought one off ebay, along with an old Wico trackball and hacked them together. Now Centipede and Missile Command are much easier to play.

It's based off of my Williams multigame control panel. The green buttons are for the Asteroids-like games. The joysticks have fire buttons for Battlezone.

Here's the bottom showing the wiring and the controller guts bottom left.

Here are the $5 controller guts. The black glob covers the chip that creates the data stream out of the button presses.

I stripped out the trackball electronics and fit the mouse guts in the case (upper right).

In this close up you can see the (unused) mouse buttons.

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