Setting my heart a flutter...

My controls arrived - gutted I used that terrible pun in the previous entry now - but anyway, MY CONTROLS ARE HERE!

 Quite excited.

Shame that picture isn't time stamped because about 2 hours later it looked like this...

Do excuse the horrible carpet - the perils of rented accommodation!

Had some fun and games with the amp, partly due to me forgetting that I had a HDMi cable plugged into my laptop that was preventing output to the headphone socket, and partly due to having to figure out which of the wires from my butchered 12v supply was positive and which was negative.

I resolved this second issue by connecting them both ways around and eliminating the one that smelt the most burny.

Took a while to figure out the joystick wiring too. 

My beautifully cheap Chinese encoder pcb is, predictably, labeled in Chinese. So I was starring at it confusedly until I happened across this diagram:

Internet 1 - China nil

After that it all went together beautifully and I was able to test it using the configuration tools built into windows.

I've been really lucky on the whole with these components.
I bought the joystick 'blind', not knowing the brand or quality, but having checked it out the reviews are resoundingly positive. It's an almost identical clone of a more expensive unit apparently.

Additionally, the 'stem' of the joystick is a little longer than you find on many examples - this is unplanned but perfect - the wood I will be building my controls into is 20mm thick so the extra length works brilliantly.

On the flip side - I've discovered that my speakers are sealed units - no screws to dismantle it - but this this is nothing that can't be rectified by a hacksaw and/or hammer.

All in all I'm delighted with these purchases, I'm on leave next week and will be knocking up a prototype control board and testing everything with my software.

Is all coming together very nicely.

#retrogaming #gaming #mame