Controller PCB questions

I am currently working on some arcade joysticks right now and I have just completed a PS2 joystick, but it is doing some strange things with different games. The up, down, left, right works fine. The triangle, square, X, circle, L1, L2, R1, and R2 works fine as well, but the start button and the select button has been giving me some problems.

Everything is soldered properly so I know that’s no a problem, but at first the start button started to get caught in a loop where it would keep pausing the game over and over. I finally got that fixed, but I still cannot get the select button to act right. When I play Jersey Devil for example you use the select button to turn the vibration on and off, but through the whole time you are playing the game it is Turing the vibration on and off the whole time. I have used a Interact Dual Impact 2 as my pcb. I can play my games for the most part but there are a few that do strange things. Also with the Interact Dual Impact 2 you will not get the use of vibration at all unless you turn on the analog buttons which could be the cause of some of my problems. Also about my select button problem when you hook up the micro switch you get 0.00 volts, but once you unhook your ground you get the proper 1.67 volts. It is like the micro switch is creating too much resistance, but none of the others give me the same problems so either its one of those things or the micro switch is bad. One other thing. After I have finally gotten my start switch working properly, for the most part, when I play The King of Fighters 99 every time you press start it resets the game back to the main menu/title screen, but other then that it works fine.

So my questions are: Why is the select button giving me problems with 0.00 voltages? Why is the select button giving my problems with cycling through? And last but no least why is the start button reset KOF99? Any answers/guesses would be great. It is more then likely just those little problems that you run into that have no real answer because no one knows.

Well, I had a simialr problem with a PSX pad. I think the wiring of PSX and PS2 pads is the same. Anyway, the select button is the only button that's seperate from the others, right? Chances are, you're not getting the right ammount of voltage through the microswitch. The problem I had was with the pins on the microswitch themselves, I used the one that was connected to ground and it fucked up the operation of the buttons. It would only activate them on the release, and sometimes cause the button to loop. All I did was switch the pin I was using on the microswitch. (if you're using Ultimate Pushbuttons from HAPP, the correct pin for me was the closes one to ground). For some reason, this regulated the resistance and fixed all the problems I was having. I doubt that will help, but it may be worth a shot.

Well, I did a similar mod, but I didn't wire the select button as I didn't need it. My problem was that every buton worked, but left and down made weird things, like pressing one makes the 2 of them being registerd... Couldn't find why crying

Its funny how somethings work the way they do. As of now I have the pin of the select button wired to the pin closest to the ground which is the NO pin and its looping over and over. I may wire the NC pin and see what happenes. When I turn on the analog sticks it does not give me that problem, but the select button does not work at all, keep in mind that I tested this using Jeresy Devil. I am wondering what could be causing it to do that. I may have to leave the analog on all the time not to get this problem, but I don't know if the select button will work at all.

To get the start button to work properly I had to wire the ground sep. from the rest of the buttons to the ground on the pad were the start button gets its ground from when pressed, but it fixed it. All I can figure is that the way the start button works is that the ground button actualy traces back to the encoder chip and the siginal traces off to a small resistor which is needed for it to work properly. Because I have not schematic for the controller I can not really give an answer for this. If I did have a schematic I could probley get some sort of answer for any of my problems. Thanks for your answers/ guesses.

I finaly got the controller to work great. What was causing my problems with the select button was infact the microswitch so I just replaced it and it works great on PSX games and PS2 games.