wraggster
September 27th, 2011, 22:51
http://hackadaycom.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/wireless_mame.jpg?w=450&h=194 (http://hackaday.com/2011/09/27/turn-your-wireless-keyboard-into-a-mame-controller/wireless_mame/)
For those of you that have a wireless keyboard laying around, you might be tempted to turn it into something else, like a wireless MAME controller (http://www.jcopro.net/2010/11/22/wireless-mame-experiment-part-1-introduction/). For those not familiar with it, MAME (http://mamedev.org/) stands for “Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator” and is generally used to run older arcade games on a computer.
Encoders are available for this purpose, however, intending to save some money, and having an unused wireless keyboard, I decided to try to make one myself. As far as I know there are no wireless encoders available for this purpose, so that was part of the motivation for trying this.
In this post I go over my mechanical design (http://www.jcopro.net/2010/11/26/wireless-mame-part-2-mechanical-design-and-construction/) for the cabinet as well as the electrical process (http://www.jcopro.net/2010/11/30/wireless-mame-part-3-electrical-design-and-construction/) of going from keyboard to MAME controller. I did eventually get the thing working, but if more than a couple buttons were pressed simultaneously, some presses were omitted. The conclusion I eventually came to was that it was better to use an encoder (http://www.jcopro.net/2011/01/12/mame-using-an-encoder/) to control everything. Not wireless, but much more reliable. If I absolutely needed a wireless controller in the future, I would think modding an actual wireless controller (or two) in a similar manner would have worked better for my purposes.
http://hackaday.com/2011/09/27/turn-your-wireless-keyboard-into-a-mame-controller/
For those of you that have a wireless keyboard laying around, you might be tempted to turn it into something else, like a wireless MAME controller (http://www.jcopro.net/2010/11/22/wireless-mame-experiment-part-1-introduction/). For those not familiar with it, MAME (http://mamedev.org/) stands for “Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator” and is generally used to run older arcade games on a computer.
Encoders are available for this purpose, however, intending to save some money, and having an unused wireless keyboard, I decided to try to make one myself. As far as I know there are no wireless encoders available for this purpose, so that was part of the motivation for trying this.
In this post I go over my mechanical design (http://www.jcopro.net/2010/11/26/wireless-mame-part-2-mechanical-design-and-construction/) for the cabinet as well as the electrical process (http://www.jcopro.net/2010/11/30/wireless-mame-part-3-electrical-design-and-construction/) of going from keyboard to MAME controller. I did eventually get the thing working, but if more than a couple buttons were pressed simultaneously, some presses were omitted. The conclusion I eventually came to was that it was better to use an encoder (http://www.jcopro.net/2011/01/12/mame-using-an-encoder/) to control everything. Not wireless, but much more reliable. If I absolutely needed a wireless controller in the future, I would think modding an actual wireless controller (or two) in a similar manner would have worked better for my purposes.
http://hackaday.com/2011/09/27/turn-your-wireless-keyboard-into-a-mame-controller/