Minimal Progress Maximum Anger
Sunday April 23, 2023
So I just don’t have button 3 wired up at all. I knew something was up way back when I was just trying to get any of the buttons working with the Pandora’s Box but I didn’t fully understand the issue. It ended up not really being an issue because I could just remap buttons to whatever I wanted on the Pandora while getting ass raped by blown out classical music. I knew it was going to bite me in the ass later.
A 4 button cab wired normally will have buttons 1, 2, 3, and 4 hooked up to the JAMMA harness. No shit. Mine is not wired normally. My buttons are hooked up to 1, 2, 4, and 5. There is a wire on button 3 (pin 24) going all the way from the JAMMA harness to the backside of the panel, but the control panel harness just doesn’t have a wire for button 3.
That one that’s missing right next to the green wire is for button 3. This is a problem now because I am trying to hook up 6 buttons with a kick harness. Buttons 1, 2, and 3 are for punches and 4, 5, and 6 are for kicks.
The MiSTer defines buttons like it was a regular gamepad with A, B, X, Y, L, and R. I can’t map R because there’s no button 3. While fucking around I plugged in one of the button wires from my original harness to what should be hard punch (or R, whatever you want to call it) and I was confused because it was reading one as X and the other one as Y. It was doing that because the wiring on my cab is weird and both the kick harness and the original harness were wired up for buttons 4 and 5. I talked to Lemony Vengeance on Discord and he helped me figure it out. I’m going to move the wire from the button 5 pin on the original harness to button 3. The original harness doesn’t need a button 5 because the kick harness is already handling that.
What’s fucked up is that this button 3 shit isn’t even the problem I initially sat down to fix. The MiSTer frequently reads directions on the stick as button presses, or it just drops the input entirely. If I can’t fix that then I’m going to just buy a CPS2 board. I need to buy new sticks anyway because the ones I have don’t fit into the new 6 button panels.
What finally made me call it a day was when I figured at the very least I’ll just map the buttons to the correct inputs in the MiSTer configuration (minus the hard punch button) and test out Street Fighter to test out the problem I mentioned above. I couldn’t even complete the button mapping because nothing would register as “A”. I was ready to smash both monitors with a sledgehammer at this point so I just went the fuck to sleep. I just want to play video games.