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Having completed my 1st Atari 9 pin interface - it became obvious that many Playstation games were unplayable due to a lack of buttons. Ideally this would be solved by interfacing PC joysticks with many more buttons - but in the mean time I decided a standard button box would be a good solution.
I experimented with homemade buttons - but in the end used 16 cheap push buttons laid out in an approximation of the standard Playstation controller.
Coral Draw 7 made short work of laying out the buttons and my drill press didn’t have any trouble with the holes.
The box itself was from RS Components - many years ago but I had never previously found a decent use for it! ;-)
I numbered each button and assigned it to a pin on the 25 way D connector. Each button was wired to a common ground which was the D connector’s shield. I had intended to wire the 25 way D connectors from scratch - but in the end cut a 25 Way scanner cable in two and wired one half into the box and the other half onto the interface board.
By the time the box was finished I was well underway with my 2nd Atari 9 pin interface board and decided to modify this first to take the button box. This board was of a simpler construction than my 1st Atari 9 pin interface board as all the connections were pull to ground types (active low) and so no additional logic was required for the button box to work.
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