megadrive pad with autofire mod, use all 3 buttons
 

The first pic attached is a sega megafire pad. It's a megadrive joypad with autofire and turbofire switches for each of the three buttons. On Amiga, B is fire1, and C is fire2. Button A doesn't do anything. I was wondering if it was possible to use all three buttons.

I thought it'd be fun to have A as fire 1 single shot and B as fire 1 turbofire. This would be really handy in games like Turrican 2 or Apidya, where you need turbo fire but also need access to single shot as well. Apidya single shot is used to fire a missile, and Turrican 2 single shot to use the lightning gun. Both these games also use fire 2 (button C).

Anyway, it's easy, just take the back off and solder a short bit of wire on to join the two solder points as in pic 2, this makes the A button do fire1 as well, but still with independent autofire functionality to button B.

I like to switch autofire on A to 'off' and autofire on B to 'on' (turbo), it's probably useful for loads of other games as well.

Needless to say don't do this if you want to use the pad on a megadrive later!

THe source code to read a 3button sega joystick and to do the wire swap is on one of the Amiga Format coverdisks that come with bullfrog source code. Sorry don't know what disk of the top of my head.

Thread moved to prb.Hardware pics :)

Sadly, without a controller to multiplex data (like the one that is present in cd32 pads) you cannot use more than 2 buttons on joypads/joysticks.

Hmm, are you sure?

Once I had a joypad, it looked alot like a SNES pad. It was blue and black, with four buttons on the front, I think. I can't remember if it had those top two L and R buttons.

Anyway, I only used one button for most games. But I remember when I was playing R-Type and R-Type 2 I made a delightful discovery - I could use three buttons!

One for normal fire (shoot, or hold down to charge your beam).

Another for rapid fire (spurting shots, no charging when you held the button down).

And a third to blast your powerup globe away from the ship. Tapping it again retracting it.

Amiga Format, issue #44, March 1993

uploading a scan of the page to the zone right now.

I don't know why you'd need any source code. I just hacked the pad so pressing button A also activates button B. So they're both Amiga fire 1.

The useful bit is that you can have different autofire settings for A and B. So A can be single shot in Turrican 2 (lightning gun), B can be turbo fire, and C stays the same as it always was, Amiga fire button 2.

You don't need any code.

EDIT: Megafire pads can be got for a couple of quid on ebay, this is just a fun and useful way to use button A on the amiga. With any game of course!

@muzcat:

yes, it needs a multiplexer, that is why u cannot modify a megadrive pad to have 3 individual buttons, or make a 6button pad act as a cd32 one...

hello,

I have 2 megadrive pads, same on the picture but not autofire, with a red start button, baught for nothing long years ago on a supermarket and never used untill now.

they coul be used safely with amiga 1200 or with CD32 ???

yes, no prob using them , except you only get 2 functional buttons....

Amiga hardware supports 3 buttons. (without multiplexing)

is there anything that actually uses the 3 buttons?

If I remember well, Hired guns did (been a while though so need confirmation by someone else).

There was a description of the wires to swap on the megadrive joypad in one of the manual of the game.

I think also turrican3 uses 3 buttons...
cool that amiga supports 3 buttons, but since I tried megadrive pads (3 and 6 buttons) they must need some re-wirring in some place...

I'd love to convert a PSX pad for use with amiga.. has anyone tried this?

You can do it by rewiring the pad, or you could create a PIC based adapter to decode the PSX data and convert it to joystick directions.

I think when playing one of the lotus games on my Amiga with a megadrive pad, the third button made a "yee har" noise. It might have been the 2nd fire button though...

The sample used for successfully negotiating the trucks.. nice :)

@Jope
K i choose the rewiring method.. havnt really looked into this before.
Personally I think the psx1 & 2 controllers have to be some of the most comfortable on the market..
neway I'll give it a go sometime next week :)

Interesting....
 

Hardware mods??

About 10 years ago when I actually owned an Amiga 500+ setup with a harddrive, I used to use 6 button controllers all the time, (a, b, c) (and turbo fire buttons for a, b, c) all 3 buttons functioned with the add of some software that was ran from the startwb folder, there were no mods to hardware required...

damned if i can recall the name of this software however, im activly searching for it at present to use with my winuae setup.

I recently converted a PSX pad using a nine pin serial cable to replace the PSX cable. The PSX pads have normal circuit boards inside, with soldering pads for each of the buttons and the direction control. Doing it like this requires that the chip inside the pad has to be disconnected, making the process pretty much non reversible. Since I didn't have the tools needed to do a neat job, it's all a bit messy inside, but it is quite easy to do if you have soldering experience. Just remember to use PS1 or PSX pads and not PS2 pads. PS2 pads don't have circuit boards inside, but pesky plastic wiring (I know, because I once cleaned one of those on the inside).