- Joined
- Jul 8, 2012
- Posts
- 835
I have two of Lemony Vengeance's Saturn-to-DB15 (Neo Geo) controller adapters which I've used and enjoyed on both my Neo Geo and my Supergun.
A few months ago one of them failed. No big worry, as I just used my 2nd converter... until it stopped working as well. I contacted Lemony for a fix, and he graciously offered to fix them if I shipped them back to him. I figured I would give fixing these a shot before bothering Lemony with this issue.
I opened up the converter and saw a rather messy and a bit scary wiring setup with very little protection for physical stress transferring to the fragile solder points. There was protection from pulling the wire from the box, but no protection from pushing the wire into the unit. I added a 2nd zip-tie on the outside of the box in order to limit the amount of travel the wire can make inside the box. It's not a great fix, and I hope that lemony or someone else can figure out a better fix.
Despite this seemingly obvious fail point, I did a bit more digging and found all the connections to be sound. Lemony did a good soldering job. His eyes must be better than mine.
I finally traced the issue to being a feature of the device, and not a flaw. These adapters are made using the FGWidget Converter (http://www.godlikecontrols.com/download/converterwelcome2.pdf) which has the ability to be reprogrammed. It seems as though I had managed to put both adapters into programmable mode, and failed to get them out, and back into working mode.
Here is the process I used to reprogram the adapters so that they are working again. I'm using a SEGA HSS-0130 dual arcade control stick, which has 2 rows of 4 buttons. I want the top 4 buttons to be A B C D on Neo Geo. START is START, and R bumper is COIN:
This button mapping works well for me but can easily be adapted to suit your setup.
A few months ago one of them failed. No big worry, as I just used my 2nd converter... until it stopped working as well. I contacted Lemony for a fix, and he graciously offered to fix them if I shipped them back to him. I figured I would give fixing these a shot before bothering Lemony with this issue.
I opened up the converter and saw a rather messy and a bit scary wiring setup with very little protection for physical stress transferring to the fragile solder points. There was protection from pulling the wire from the box, but no protection from pushing the wire into the unit. I added a 2nd zip-tie on the outside of the box in order to limit the amount of travel the wire can make inside the box. It's not a great fix, and I hope that lemony or someone else can figure out a better fix.
Despite this seemingly obvious fail point, I did a bit more digging and found all the connections to be sound. Lemony did a good soldering job. His eyes must be better than mine.
I finally traced the issue to being a feature of the device, and not a flaw. These adapters are made using the FGWidget Converter (http://www.godlikecontrols.com/download/converterwelcome2.pdf) which has the ability to be reprogrammed. It seems as though I had managed to put both adapters into programmable mode, and failed to get them out, and back into working mode.
Here is the process I used to reprogram the adapters so that they are working again. I'm using a SEGA HSS-0130 dual arcade control stick, which has 2 rows of 4 buttons. I want the top 4 buttons to be A B C D on Neo Geo. START is START, and R bumper is COIN:
- On a Saturn controller that is plugged into the unit - which is then plugged into a DB15 socken on your Neo Geo or Supergun
- boot your machine and set to an input check screen. This will allow you to easily confirm what mode the adapter is in. If you do not have access to a input check screen, you can use the game select screen of a multicart. Other options are out there, this is just what I used.
- press the D-Pad up and down to confirm input is getting through.
- hold START button on Saturn controller for 20 seconds. This will put you into program mode. Confirm you are in program mode by moving the d-pad up and down. In this mode your d-pad motions will not do anything.
- press the buttons on the Saturn pad in this order: X, R bumper, Y, A, Z, B, C, L bumper
- wait 5 seconds for the adapter to reset
- play your game with the correct Neo Geo button mapping.
This button mapping works well for me but can easily be adapted to suit your setup.
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