Friday, March 17, 2006

xbox work continues

So i worked on the xbox Tuesday night for almost 5 hours.

I better back up and let anyone new know what's going on. I am trying to add an additional port to the player 1 controls of an xbox. I want to do this so that I can have a wireless controller attached and an arcade machine control panel attached to the player one port at the same time. It turns out that actually having both active at once is a bad thing as it's actually a standard USB device. So I decided to put a switch in the power line so that either one gets power or the other doesn't.

Quick basic electronics lesson for those who don't know anything about this, and actually got this far. Think of electricity like water. Your wires are water pipes. You have an incoming pipe (power) and an outgoing pipe (called ground usually). I am working with 5 lines of water, but they all get their water from the main incoming power pipe and it all leaves on the outgoing pipe, or ground line.

I think that my solution will work, but it had a flaw. I was only switching the power on and off. Each of the ports works, and the switch also works (after jiggling a loose cable, that was an easy fix though). The problem is that if there are two things plugged in at once then it causes both ports to not work, even with the switch.

The theory that a friend of mine and I have is that since the ground wire is attached to the other lines, some of the power is "bleeding" out the unpowered device. So if we switch on the power and the ground lines both are connected, the power goes through the unpowered device instead of the powered one -- thus they both don't work.

I have pictures, but couldn't find the cable to download them yesterday, so I'll try to post those tonight.

In other semi-related news someone has ported MAME to the xbox. This has actually been out there for a good long time, but a recent update for the xbox is called "MAMEdOX platinum". There's no official website, but if you're into that kind of thing you might want to check it out.

Gotta run, maybe more later tonight.

3 comments:

Bob said...

Would a USB switchbox work? I don't know enough about USB and I'm too lazy to google and read about it to know if your theory is correct. I've seen USB switches for around $10-15.

My wife won't let me have an xbox, I probably wouldn't play it much anyway. I like the older arcade games, some NeoGeo stuff, SmashTV, garbage like that... The stuff that was out back when I worked in an arcade in the early 90's, and the real early stuff I played as a kid, like Frogger, DigDug, etc.

Whatever you do, don't let the smoke out.

DadGuy said...

A USB switchbox would work... but the only ones I could find were $50+ so I decided against that. Besides, as much as I curse about it, I really like tinkering. =)

Oh, and I'll be careful about the magic smoke.

Bob said...

I saw some USB switches for just over $10. Cyberguys.com has some cheap ones, a real ugly one for $8.95 and a nicer one for $22.

I used to like tinkering but it's gotten to be too much like work.