I’m fairly certain that the upcb doesn’t go to sleep or any other power managed mode when using the piggyback. It sits there and checks to see if start + select gets pressed to fake a guide button press.
I’m still looking into the issue, it might just be an inexpert padhack at fault, i’ll keep at it.
OK, i’ve spent some time with the piggyback now and can be a lot more speific as to what happens. here is a quick list of noted behavior:
piggyback unplugged, hold no buttons: starts normally
piggyback unplugged, hold any buttons: starts normally
piggyback plugged in, hold no buttons: starts normally
piggyback plugged in, hold any button: fails to start up, pic begins to heat up.
piggyback unplugged, hold F and R, plug in usb then plug in piggyback: works normally.
piggyback unplugged, hold F and R, plug in usb, hold any button while plugging in piggyback: works normally.
this brings me to conclude that the piggyback is working fine, but there is something really odd going on with the upcb when it starts up with the piggyback attached. have you seen a similar circumstance toodles?
Little update on my upcb: I’ve finally got it running perfectly! Turns out the crystal was crappy after all. My local hardware store sold me two of those. I’ll be shopping at my not-so-local hardware store from now on…
Is there a way to upgrade the universial PCB for Button LED support?
e.g.
If you are using Sega Megadrive Cable: 3 Buttons and Start button, and the Stick lights up.
or:
If you are using Super NES Cable 8 Buttons lights up.
Best if there were support for RGB-Leds so the 4 Buttons of the SNES lights in red,
blue, green, yellow.
with the current micro on the upcb that is impossible, there arn’t enough pins. It might be possible to hack together something to do that on a separate micro however.
the solution of Ikrenegade sounds the best. A separate mc could decode the cable code and gives you the wanted led lighting. Probably with a led driver or something.
The piggybacks could be decoded more easily. If the piggyback is active the dc or xbox select line is active. I used this for lighting up my padhack plexi
So I was going to make myself a GC cable just for the heck of it but I was a bit confused when I read the file for the cable. It says that the 3.4v line will be tied to the data line with a pullup resister. So I imagine that which ever pin the data line is going to I should also solder on a pullup resistor attached to the 3.4v line. However later when the file shows the pin out for the D-sub connector it mentions cutting back the 3.4v line when you cut back the two unused grounds. Its saying to do two different things with the same line, so which do I do?
Ok guys, I posted on here earlier about this, but I got distracted by real life. Things are finally settling down, and I’d like to get this working.
I assembled two upcbs, one for me and one for a friend. I got an icsp programmer, and programmed the pics. Tested out both pics on one of the UPCB, both worked. Tested the pics in the other UPCB, no luck. Didn’t have time to fool around with it, so I sent the working upcb to my friend, and kept the other one for myself.
I noticed that C5 and C6 were installed wrong, so I took them out and replaced them. The new ones look funny because they wouldn’t go through the holes, but they have a good connection.
I took some pics of the top of the board and the bottom in the hopes someone could point out what was wrong to me.
bencao, thanks, but the all the connections in that circuit test fine, and I get 1M ohm between pins 13 and 14. Do you think a bad crystal might cause this? I don’t have any way to test it, but I think I can get a 20mhz one locally.
Thanks for the link, I was wondering more so about Toodles firmware than the connection, as he mentions it is coded but not tested. I guess if it works with the 2600 it will work with the Master. The SMS is weird, some games work with a Genesis controller while others do not, and the buttons are always mixed around.
I thought maybe you were only interested in getting your WIP joystick working with the SMS, in which case the UPCB would be overkill. Give it a shot when you’re finished with the joystick, I’m sure Toodles would love to put more systems into the confirmed working list.
When I plug the upcb into usb with the button select cable I get absolutely nothing. The usb supplies power and ground, but nothing shows up in device manager or under gaming options in control panel. I’ve tested on my mac mini as well. Same thing, nothing shows in system profiler. The usb ports are tested working with other devices.