Ok, did some very quick research this morning (while waiting for Brian to try and tell me the network was down again – which it isn’t, it’s operator error. *SIGH*) and discovered some cool toys that would allow me to kill two birds with one stone.
Heabo likes games, which is cool – I like getting the chance to set down and play some stuff on MAME with her, and of course I’ve now got the new N64 stuff and my NES and SNES collection of games that we can play (if I ever complete my collection, it will end up being something like 4000 games – I’ve got a complete Atari 2600 game set around here somewhere, everything ever produced. I’ve got a HUGE chunk of the NES stuff, and a 50% complete MAME set. Any wonder I want to write games for a living for a while? I’m bloody addicted 😉
But one o’ the problems with playing games is the lack of hardware – I have to play on the keyboard while she plays on the joystick. I’ve only got one joystick, and it’s not quite set right for a N64 – it doesn’t have all the controls, so for each game I have to reconfigure the controls. Unlike Atari and SNES pads, an N64 stick has A LOT of functions to handle, including things like the rumble pack (ok, well, that’s not exactly a nessesity to make it work) so just slapin’ together a new interface isn’t nearly as easy. Well, I found that I’m not the only person who’s looked at the problems, and quite a few have come up with good solutions.
For problem 1 – a set of DDR pads. I found a SNES adapter I can construct for about $10 – it adapts FIVE SNES adapters to a parallel port interface, and has programable drivers for it. Awsome – the SNES pad has 10 inputs each, and I need 9 inputs for a ‘proper’ universal DDR pad (the machines are slightly different over the ‘generations’ – DDR 1 has 4 directions, Pump It Up! has 5, and the newest DDR machines have 7. 9, plus a start button would be perfect. The SNES pads are cheap as hell, ‘specially if I could find a couple at a yard sale or somethin’. I’ll take two of those, rip ’em apart, and build two DDR pads from ’em – still have two design decisions to make about the pads (soft top -vs- hard topped pads is the hard one). Then buy two more (actually, there’s one floating around the house somewhere) for Heabo and I to play games together on. Then eventually, I’ll buy two N64 to USB converters, and two PlayStation to USB converters (there’s some PS games I’d love to get the chance to play, but, havent – and since the games are cheap as hell used now, it’s not a bad way to do things 🙂 Obviously the last two are going to have to wait a few months before I have the money to buy ’em, and then a little more after that before I can actually buy the game controllers – but it would be nice to have it set up for 4 players for Smash Brothers and other games like that 🙂
All this, just so I can feed my game addictions… sheesh. Better games than crack I suppose 😉
And if this entry makes not much sense, read the one before it…. 😉