Arduino Arcade Controller

Purpose

The purpose of this project is to add the necessary libraries to turn a teensy 3.0 into both a joystick or keyboard controller for use in MAME emulation.

I created this project because I was creating a four player arcade cabinet that would allow for up to 10 buttons per player. When researching PCBs to use with this cabinet every one I found was either to expensive or did not support the number of players/inputs I was looking for. Since I had some experience working with arduino's in the past I decided to buy a couple of teenseys and solve this problem myself.

I am putting this source code up here on github to hopefully help give a starting off point for the next maker who finds themselves in the same situation I was in.

Hardware used for creating arcade controllers

Each of my four arcade controllers had - 1 - Teensy 3.2 board https://www.adafruit.com/product/2756?gclid=EAIaIQobChMInJ-GkbTY5AIVcRh9Ch2AeQdXEAQYAyABEgJ7aPD_BwE. 1 - Sanwa JLF joystick. 10 (11 for the player one who had an addtional escape button) - Happ competition buttons.

When choosing what hardware to use for my cabinet I found this article extremely useful. https://www.tested.com/art/makers/464539-choosing-buttons-and-joysticks-custom-arcade-cabinet/

Why I made the technology and design choices I did

1. Why Teensy 3.2 board - I choose the teensy 3.0 board because teensy offers a robust library that sits on top of arduino which supports keyboard/mouse/joystick input out of the box saving me time on writting the underlying libraries.

2. Why support both a keyboard and joystick mode. My plan for this arcade cabinet was to emulate both MAME(digital joystick) and Gamecube(analog joystick) games. By supporting both a joystick and keyboard mode I made working with emulators easier.

Issues and solutions I ran into

1. One problem I ran into was since the joystick is all digital inputs and only determines direction not magnitude what would be the best way of simulating a analog joystick for gamecube emulators? What I ended up deciding on doing was using one of my buttons as a magnitude switch that toggled the joystick from a high magnitude direction to a low magnitude direction.

2. Since I would not have easy access to my components how would I handle switching between the joystick and keyboard modes. I decided the easiest and best way from me to switch between modes was to switch when all eight of the players primary buttons are pressed.

Set Up

1. Install arduino
2. Run teensy installer for arduino https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/td_download.html
3. In arduino IDE go to manage libaries and add Bounce2
4. Go to your arduino directory and add a symbolic link from the arduino libraries directory to this github project's libaries directory.