Joystick, button recommendation
  • dsrichard
    Hi all -

    Got piplay up and running on RPi B+ last night. Would like recommendation on arcade style (red ball) joystick and a couple of buttons. My criteria are pretty clear: cheap, integrates well with piplay, can ultimately be used with other controllers in cocktail table. Not sure if these are mutually exclusive but would love some guidance.

    This whole project is being done with my kids so any solution that reduces the amount of cursing it causes me would be of benefit. :-)

    David
  • pilesofspam
    I assume you're building some arcade-style controls, meaning full size and pretty much indestructible. The source will depend a lot on your location, but I've had some luck with the Suzo-happ ultimate pushbutton. For a good red ball joystick, they also have this one (ms. pacman) (but note that one is only a 4-way joystick, making it extremely hard to go diagonal) and the easiest way to interface these in my opinion is with the I-PAC. If you'd rather save a little coin, most of these (or similar) controls are available on ebay and you can use Adafruit's Retrogame for an interface, but it might need a little soldering. Note that Adafruit also offers its own brand of really good controls.

    I've used both of these methods with success, so let me know which way you want to head and I can provide a little more detail.

    Dave
  • sancho1234
    Hi Dave! I would like to install the Adafruit solution for control of my PiPlay. but I can't installthe retrogame gpio driver on PiPlay platform corretly. I can use it with Cupcade Rom by Adafruit, but the PiPlay couldn't to connect to the Adafruit's 4-way joystick. Can you help me?

    The error message:

    pi@piplay ~/retrogame $ sudo retrogame &
    [1] 3681
    pi@piplay ~/retrogame $ retrogame: Pin config failed.  Try 'sudo retrogame'.

    The installation method:

    pi@piplay ~/retrogame $ make CFLAGS=-DCUPCADE
    gcc -DCUPCADE -Wall -O3 -fomit-frame-pointer -funroll-loops -s retrogame.c -o retrogame strip retrogame
    gcc -DCUPCADE -Wall -O3 -fomit-frame-pointer -funroll-loops -s gamera.c -lncurses -lmenu -lexpat -o gamera strip gamera
    pi@piplay ~/retrogame $ sudo make install
    mv retrogame gamera /usr/local/bin










  • pilesofspam
    Hi Sancho- what is your hardware setup? On mine, I'm not using the cupcade display; rather I'm using the composite output, so I modified the retrogame.c (specifically in ioStandard[]) key bindings. I don't have the specifics here (at work at the moment) but afterwards my installation was:

    make retrogame

    Of course you can always ls -l afterwards to make sure the build date on retrogame is correct.

    Rather than make install, I just ran it (to its location) in /etc/rc.local, adding something that looks like: /home/pi/Adafruit-Retrogame/retrogame &

    Seems to work fine, except for the crappy buttons I've chosen.
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