Simple gamepad

Radek Polak psonek2 at seznam.cz
Sat Jan 16 23:27:07 CET 2010


Hi,
i just wanted to share this probably most simple "hardware" mod for your Neo,

Here is the story: 

I have ported zx-spectrum emulator to play some good old games. The games can 
be played using touchscreen. The emulator allows you to place "key bind" on 
screen. If you press that location it generates apropriate key code and sends 
it to spectrum.

The problem is that it's very hard to to always touch the right place. So i 
have added notifications. When you dont press location close enough the phone 
will vibrate. This helped a bit but still it was very hard to hit the right 
place.

After some thinking how to improve the situation, i took cellotape, cut 4 
small cicles and pasted them on Freerunner touchscreen in the layout of 
gamepad.

In the end i realized i just need 2 circles and i made them from 4 layers, so 
that they are better felt by fingers.

And I didnt pasted them straight on touchscreen glass - i am using protection 
shield so the touchscreen remains unharmed.

It all works surprisingly good. You can feel the cellotape circles under your 
fingers so you always press the correct location.

Here are some pictures if you are interested:

http://activationrecord.net/radekp/pub/gamepad1.jpg
http://activationrecord.net/radekp/pub/gamepad2.jpg

I know that this mod cant measure with something cool like this[1] one, but 
for us that dont have time and skills to make real gamepad, it can be quite 
enough.

Hope this howto helps some gamers :)

Regards

Radek


[1] http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/USB_Gamepad_(NeoPlay)



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