TG-16 arcade joystick: Durability? Like it? Use it?

[rxmage]

I picked up a Turbo Stick in a recent lot.  It definitely improves my game on shooters (and I need all the help I can get).  However, since it uses membrane contacts instead of micro switches, it feels like you're moving a spoon around in a bowl of oatmeal.  I dug out some micro switch joysticks and buttons from my arcade stuff.  If I have the right TTLs, this weekend I plan to try and hack together my own version.  StarDust4Ever, I love your attached photos.  The PiMame rocks!

[StarDust4Ever]

StarDust4Ever, I love your attached photos.  The PiMame rocks!

Thanks! My larger than life arcade controllers are surprisingly comfortable to use. Retro Pie is awesome. I need to get a Pi3 and upgrade to the latest version.

[rxmage]

Thanks! My larger than life arcade controllers are surprisingly comfortable to use. Retro Pie is awesome. I need to get a Pi3 and upgrade to the latest version.

I would imagine that the large controllers would have the feel of an arcade cabinet.  To an old fart like me, that would feel like being home.  I have a Pi3 I stuffed into a SNES mini running Recalbox.  The Pi3 gives you a noticeable boost on N64 games, but nothing earth shattering.  I think once the kernel is optimized for the 64bit processor, we will see a nice increase.

[StarDust4Ever]

I would imagine that the large controllers would have the feel of an arcade cabinet.  To an old fart like me, that would feel like being home.

Yep. My inspiration was the coffee table NES controller that went viral a few years back. I wanted to make a practical to use controller and a 20x8x4 inches plywood box was a good size and weight for adding arcade parts. It's the right size for placing in your lap and the wood itself has enough mass that it won't rock around when rocking the joystick. It uses 3rd party console extension cables for the cable and had a custom digital turbo circuit. The black buttons above the red ones operate as turbo buttons and the knob connects to a 4-position switch which adjusts the digital turbo rate.

Sometime I'll rebuild the circuit to add Turbografx support since the 4-bit counter I used for the digital turbo is already part of the Turbo schematic. Some NES games which use PCM sound channel poll the controller multiple times to prevent read errors, so I had to add a 555 timer operating as a one stop to hold the latch signal for ~2ms until the controller polling was finished. Otherwise cycling the inputs on every latch will crash games that polled the controller multiple times for error correction.

I practically have an Electrical Engineering Technology degree so designing the custom circuit from the ground up using discrete logic was quite a neat undertaking. Sorry for derailing...