Playstation Controllers
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Posts: 46,084
Well;
First a little background, recently I've been fooling around with
Nintendo emulators and it was all good fun playing games from "back
in the day" but developed a desire to play them with the original
controllers. This desire led me to search the web for all sorts of
stuff I was afraid it was going to be quite an ordeal to interface
the two however after searching for not too long I found DirectPad
Pro an amazing driver which allows you to plug in a variety of
different game controllers into your computers parallel port. I
highly advise checking it out
http://www.arcadecontrols.com/Mirrors/www.ziplabel.com/dpadpro/
sorry that was horribly off topic but that was what lead me to my
discovery. That almost all of these controllers (all aside from the
N64) use a simple shift register (also known as an SPI like)
interface to retreive the data from the controllers. For the older
series controllers this is of little interest because they are
essential simple 74HC165's (8 bit shift registers) with a nice array
of buttons connected to them. However during my search I found all
sorts of online info regarding the Playstation dual-shock Controller
which is a standard playstation controller (with 14 buttons) as well
as two joysticks (this could be hot wired to provide 4 sepperate 8
bit analog inputs) and also the ability to drive two motors (their
force feedback) it appears to be only one direction but with 8 bit
pulse width modulation control.
This controller uses five volt logic and I couldn't imagine it being
particularly difficult to interface it to a Stamp (I'm afraid I'm
currently not set up to try it). But the potential for using the pre-
existing circutry in this controller is quite unlimited and although
all of these functions are easily attained with not particularly
difficult support IC's but at the cost (they're only $20 at
Amazon.com they could probably be found for less than that) and the
ease of implementation (probably just desoldering a few
potentiometers and trhen connecting your own in their place (the
same with buttons)).
Sorry that was a little mumbled in places but I think the point got
across (at least I hope it did) in my search I've come across some
sites which might help if you choose to explore this.
An explanation of the pinout and transfer protocol
http://laurent.saintmarcel.free.fr/psx/
Not particularly useful but a picture of the inside of the
controller (the second one on this page is the dual shock)
http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/playstation3.htm
Hope this wasn't too off-topic and hopefully helpful to at least a
few.
AARON
PS. you'll drive yourself crazy looking for a nice description of
the protocol for dealing with the force feedback function of these
controllers the only allusion to the function I have found is
contained in a document (Playstation Developers Guide), which is not
that difficult to obtain online, but I could imagine their being a
few copyright issues with its pressence so I won't post a link to it
but if you search for it you can find it quite easily.
First a little background, recently I've been fooling around with
Nintendo emulators and it was all good fun playing games from "back
in the day" but developed a desire to play them with the original
controllers. This desire led me to search the web for all sorts of
stuff I was afraid it was going to be quite an ordeal to interface
the two however after searching for not too long I found DirectPad
Pro an amazing driver which allows you to plug in a variety of
different game controllers into your computers parallel port. I
highly advise checking it out
http://www.arcadecontrols.com/Mirrors/www.ziplabel.com/dpadpro/
sorry that was horribly off topic but that was what lead me to my
discovery. That almost all of these controllers (all aside from the
N64) use a simple shift register (also known as an SPI like)
interface to retreive the data from the controllers. For the older
series controllers this is of little interest because they are
essential simple 74HC165's (8 bit shift registers) with a nice array
of buttons connected to them. However during my search I found all
sorts of online info regarding the Playstation dual-shock Controller
which is a standard playstation controller (with 14 buttons) as well
as two joysticks (this could be hot wired to provide 4 sepperate 8
bit analog inputs) and also the ability to drive two motors (their
force feedback) it appears to be only one direction but with 8 bit
pulse width modulation control.
This controller uses five volt logic and I couldn't imagine it being
particularly difficult to interface it to a Stamp (I'm afraid I'm
currently not set up to try it). But the potential for using the pre-
existing circutry in this controller is quite unlimited and although
all of these functions are easily attained with not particularly
difficult support IC's but at the cost (they're only $20 at
Amazon.com they could probably be found for less than that) and the
ease of implementation (probably just desoldering a few
potentiometers and trhen connecting your own in their place (the
same with buttons)).
Sorry that was a little mumbled in places but I think the point got
across (at least I hope it did) in my search I've come across some
sites which might help if you choose to explore this.
An explanation of the pinout and transfer protocol
http://laurent.saintmarcel.free.fr/psx/
Not particularly useful but a picture of the inside of the
controller (the second one on this page is the dual shock)
http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/playstation3.htm
Hope this wasn't too off-topic and hopefully helpful to at least a
few.
AARON
PS. you'll drive yourself crazy looking for a nice description of
the protocol for dealing with the force feedback function of these
controllers the only allusion to the function I have found is
contained in a document (Playstation Developers Guide), which is not
that difficult to obtain online, but I could imagine their being a
few copyright issues with its pressence so I won't post a link to it
but if you search for it you can find it quite easily.