Roadblaster CP to Star Wars yoke/MAME

[webmonkees]

Odd question after being offline for a couple of years of medical recovery.. but now working up to revisiting my tinkering to refresh my skills.. anyhow..

I have an Atari Roadblaster steering yoke that I'd like to add an axis to make it suitable for controlling Atari Star Wars in MAME or equivalent. I seem to recall a 'Microsoft Sidewinder' that some have used to retrofit such controls but given the progress of tech maybe a Arduino would be suitable.. the main challenge is

re-configuring the x-only driving yoke to add up-down. There's nothing but the control panel that a generous person sent me to work with, so I'm not destroying a vintage game, jut want to see if it might be possible using some cutting and design to make it work. Someone was trying to make SW yokes but not sure how that turned out, I want to take the Roadblaster yoke as a cheap start for the project. I may have posted about this many years earlier but well I had some medical issues that's been preventing me from many things for a couple of years, this is therapy now.. yeesh.

Thanks,

Charlie

 

[doubledown]

If the grips are fixed (don't rotate front to back), that will be your first hurdle.  ALAN-1 does offer arcade quality Star Wars reproduction yokes HERE.

[Stephen Moss]

If there are no buttons on the front of the hand grips then perhaps you could mount a couple of momentary (non-latching) push button switches there (say left = up, right = down) connected to a microcontroller that in turn either sends data to an DAC or controller the output of a digital potentiometer to produce the relevant voltage.

 

However, if you want to stay true to the original controller design then as doubledown said you will first have to find a way of making the hand grips rotate back and forth.