So I soldered up a Mad Catz Dual force 3 controller for a custom joystick I built, and everything works great except the left direction only registers for about 2 seconds, then stops registering.
If I move the joystick back to center, left direction works fine again… for 2 seconds. So the switch seems to work fine, it just doesn’t keep registering while I hold to the left. I checked the connections and put in a new microswitch on the joystick, but it didnt’ fix it.
I read online that some X-arcade sticks have this problem, and need to be swapped to Analog mode and then work fine. Any idea how I’d swap a Mad Catz Dual Force 3 to Analog mode?
Thanks for any help! I searched the forums, but didn’t run into an answer for this.
Ah,hadn’t heard about Mad Catz having that problem, Markman =/ sucks!
I’ll try a different ground. It seemed like there were two. The directions and main buttons used one ground, and the start/select/PS3 Home button used a second ground. I’ll fiddle around with it and see if the left direction responds to another ground better.
Nope, no luck fiddling with different grounds. I checked it pretty carefully by following traces, and I was grounding it right. It just won’t send the “left joystick” signal longer than 2 seconds.
I had the same problem (with 6 seconds) with a Speedlink PS2-to-USB adapter. Went to litter. Would have cared about sending it back if it weren’t that cheap.
I bought a cheap logic 3 PS3 pad and noticed the same problem with it. When i hold downleft it returns to down after few seconds, hold left returns neutral etc. I’t really sucks, because it makes the pad unuseable.
I highly doubt that even madcats would release a pad that had this problem.
not 100% on this but iirc there was a problem similar to this with ps2 pcb’s? something about needing to use a resistor that was built into the ribbon that connects the buttons to the pcb.
id like to get my hands on one of these to tinker around with it
I took a good look at all the original pieces of the pad and I don’t see anything I really changed. There wasn’t any ribbon connector, and the left connection didn’t have anything odd about it that I could see. the d-pad button was the same as the other directions, no additional grounds that I could see that made left side act differently. I’ll see about getting a photo of the PCB posted - maybe you’ll notice something I missed!
I had an issue with a “Hama” wired ps3 controller with the left stopping. So I got a brand new logic3 wired PS3 controller and the issue remains. Except this time I tested it without even opening the pad to hack it and the problem occurs on this pad too. :looney: faulty product ftl.
I notice on ps2 dualshock pads there is an analogue switch:
Is there a way to wire up resistors to the left thumbstick and make it behave as a digital?
just did some testing and I got the left thumbstick to behave as digital (up down left right) which I can wire up to a JLF 5 pin with the help of an optocouple. I just want to know if there is a problem with using the left thumbstick in place of the d-pad on ps3 games/menus.
I don’t have every fighting game and maybe some of them need the d-pad to navigate menu’s? Or can the left thumbstick (hacked as digital) be a valid substitute for the d-pad in fighting games?
edit:
tested it on sf4 ps3 and everything seems fine. Menus all work with the left thumbstick in game as well as in Home menu. You can either use a non-cg stick (connect to the microswitches individually) or an optocoupler to make it common line/
faulty product ftl.