Short version:
How can you get Dualshock analog stick work with a cthulhu or paewang pcb?
Long version:
So I successfully put a paewang revolution pcb inside a Dualshock3 controller using the following video as a base guide by our own Gummo.
[media=youtube]0fO3F6Xi9W0[/media]
Thanks Gummo for helping me and for putting up with me.
Basically, I want to help PS pad players who play “wolfkrone style”, which is just using the analog stick for moving, play on Xbox360 and also have a tournament legal pad. They tell me that they don’t like the feel and shape of a 360 pad and prefer a Playstation pad, more specifically, a DS3. How can I get Dualshock analog stick work with a cthulhu or paewang pcb? With intelligent tech talk members here, I am sure your help will make this mod a success.
Note: I am NOT a pad player but a stick player. I am doing this for the love of the community as much as all of you are and should.
if i remember right, the paewang doesn’t support LS and RS inputs. Even still, an arcade board to emulate such a thing would be difficult to do. Currently off the top of my head, nothing is programmed with RS support through pots that’s common ground.
You could do the ben heck style pad mod with a wired xbox 4176 pad in a DS3 shell
A Cthulhu won’t help play using DualShock on an XBox 360; the Cthulhu doesn’t support 360. You’ll almost certainly need a padhack, unless you want to make an ADC circuit to turn analogue signals into digital ones (which would be a royal pain due to deadzone considerations, etc.)
Of course I know that Cthulhu won’t work on the Xbox360 just by itself. Pretty much need to turn the analog signal to a digital one. I was messing with an analog stick from a spare DS1 and I got the Up and Left to work just fine. Diagonals, Down, and Right is the hard part.
Niether the Paewong nor the Cthulhu accept analog inputs. You’re going to have to hack a pad that does, like the Gamestop pad. That’s not an easy task to get it into a DS3 shell.
A more practical answer would be a DualShock 1 or DualShock 2 and an etokki converter, but I can’t swear that it handles analogs, but I expect it does.
I dont think it would be that big of a pain. If I were to try, I’d probably need a chip with 3 analog inputs, and put a trimpot on the third and use the value read from the trimpot to adjust whether or not to activate a direction. If the customer wanted more or less sensitivity, they could just adjust the pot to match. I rigged up something similar for a painful project a number of years ago to turn a trigger style analog into a digital signal with adjustable sensitivity.
Yeah, fair point; I take that back. I was thinking trying to make a circular deadzone (which is how a lot of stick deadzones work from what I’ve seen) with a discrete comparator chip implementation. It could be pretty easily done with a small microprocessor. I was actually contemplating making a branch off the DualStrike code specifically for analogue stick inputs a while back.
That’d be pretty easy too. You could either use up some program memory for an X/Y=> Magnitude table, or try to write a fast sqrt() function to determine it on the fly, and use 'if (x<2y) then {dir=ycardinal }else {if (y<2x) dir = xcardinal; else dir = diagonal} along with the MSB of the two analog values to determine which direction(s) to activate if the magnitude is greater than trimpot magnitude.
Oh god I hope not. That was a long time ago.
I think you’re thinking the other way around; he’s asking how to hack a 360 controller so he can use a PS3 dual shock analog stick somehow. We’re suggesting an option use having that PS3 analog stick be converted to digital signals so he can use the usual padhacking suspects that dont support analog inputs like the paewong. I think what you’re asking about is using a digital input (arcade stick) to report to the Dreamcast as an analog stick instead of a digital. That’s totally doable, either with some minor hardware hacks with a padhacked DC pad that has an analog, or by tweaking the code in a board that speaks Dreamcast, like the Kitty or MC Cthulhu.
Ah! No, I see what the OP is doing – if I understand your old project correctly, I’m referring to using digital buttons “as” analog triggers; you can’t ready the gun without keeping the trigger held down. I guess the Cthulhu could do this as well? It’s been a longgg time since I’ve examined the DC trigger hack but I remember it looking tough…
That’s about what I was thinking, µC-wise; the challenge I was referring to was doing it without a µC, and still getting a circular deadzone. A square deadzone could probably be pulled off with a single LM339 (that’s the quad, right?) and a little bit of trickiness with analogue stuff (syncing/centering the range of the deadzone would take some actual thought that I don’t want to do right now).
Eeek. That’s a lotta opamps to make it a circular deadzone. I know its certainly possible, since we’re talking the functions of square root, absolute value, multiplication, addition, and a few final comparisons, but man that’s a whole bunch of opamps to pull it off.
That’s why I was thinking circular deadzone + non-µC solution = PITA in the first place. Once you have a freaking 8-bit computer in there, all the pain goes away. Lately for personal projects, I keep going between “Eh, just through a micro at it…” and “Let’s try to do this old-school…”, generally choosing exactly the wrong thing for the occasion. I seem to like making things hard for myself.
not quite. OP mentions specifically for the DS3 to be used.
As underwing and Toodles mentioned, the best solution to your problem is to program a microchip with ADC abilities to convert the left analog stick movements into digital movements and hook that to the dpad.
I had to do that when I modded a MS 360 pad with a MC cthulhu. Client wanted to use the left analog stick and not the dpad. So I programmed a microchip to do that and added the ability to cycle through 3 different sensitivity settings by pressing the sync button. I also removed the dpad and put 4 blue leds in its place. They lit up in the direction that the analog stick is at.
edit: I’m glad someone else found that video somewhat useful. Cool beans on doing it with the paewang. I never really got a chance to hack down a paewang pcb down to size.
Part of me wants to grab one of those PCB’s, just to see how small I could make it.
As for the ADC converter issue, it’s funny – the circuit itself would be a small and cheap thing, built with a $1-2 µC and a couple connectors, and if designed right could be really adaptable. Tempting to try my hand at it, but then again, I have a whole list of projects I’d love to play with, and zero time these days. Oh well.
Other than the triggers, there’s nothing much different between a DS2 and a DS3. In fact, if you’re mapping things to R2 and L2, the DS2 is actually the better choice.
I’ll chime in and agree with d3v’s suggestion. Getting an official PlayStation 2 DualShock 2 and respective converters is how I would go about getting a PlayStation styled controller working on both of today’s modern consoles. You’d need 3 things:
All in all, that will run you about $70.00 raw, with I’d say about $15.00 give or take for shipping. I don’t know how expensive the parts would be to make a DualShock 3 work on an Xbox 360, but it would sure be a lot harder than just buying a DualShock 2 and those aforementioned converters.
Also, to answer a question earlier supplied, yes, both converters properly convert all inputs from the DualShock 2, including rumble and the analog sticks.
