The time has come to connect your buttons and joysticks to the computer. This is accomplished in several different ways. You can hack an old keyboard. But if you don't have access to Boeing Surplus, the only place on the planet where you can buy an old keyboard, then you need to use a (more reliable) thing called a Keyboard Encoder. The keyboard encoder pretends to be a keyboard. That's pretty much it. I chose to go with the KeyWiz keyboard encoder.
It has 32 inputs, 24 "shifted" inputs (as in, if you press the shift key, you get more buttons) and it was cheap. But don't just buy an encoder because it worked for some clown on the internet. Everyone has a different idea of what they want their CP to do. Some people are down with the Street Fighter scene, some people dig Mr. Do!, and still, others want a full on big ol' Gauntlet setup. You should choose a keyboard encoder that is right for your dream machine. It is very important to research this topic. Look at other people's pages and find out what they did. But most of all, go HERE!!! It is the bible of all keyboard encoders. It will tell you everything you need to know. In fact, it is so important that I'm going to eventually mirror it, for it would be a shame for it to disappear.
What really sold me on the keywiz, though, was the constant disclaimers that it shouldn't be used to control any kind medication dispenser or assisted breathing device. The people at keywiz care.
Wiring up the final thing is fairly simple. Just buy a bunch of wire and "female quick disconnects" and start going. Take a look at this picture though:
This is a button. Happ does not send button wiring instructions along with its products. KeyWiz does, but they apparently went to the Hatfield school of ANSI drawing. You need to wire all of the "ground" connectors to the "ground" hole in the keywiz. That should be simple enough to grasp. But there are two other prongs on the buttons... why? Well, it took me an abnormally long time to figure that out. If you connect to the "don't connect" prong, then the button waits for you to let up before it sends a signal. In other words, Ryu won't throw his punch when you hit the button, he'll wait until you let go. So, wire all your buttons to the correct prong.
For the grounds, it is best to daisy chain them together. The KeyWiz comes with two ground holes. I daisy chained all my joysticks to one hole and all my buttons to the other. Daisy chain means you string a ground wire through all of the ground prongs on all the buttons and tie the end off on the ground hole in the keywiz. That was poorly worded. Here, have an illustration:
At this point in the journey, each person will split off and have to discover for themselves what to do next. Each encoder is different. For me, I plug the encoder into the keyboard hole in my laptop. Then I start the KeyWiz software, which I used to define what each button does, then I "upload" that information to the encoder, close the software and ARCADE away until I puke all over the place.
I like the KeyWiz because of it's SHAZAAM button. It acts like the "shift" that I was speaking of before. When I press the SHAZAAM button in combination with another button, say, the blue button, it will act in a manner that I have preset in the software. In other words, the blue button now becomes the ENTER key, the green button become the ESC key, the yellow button becomes the TAB key. And so on. Essentially, I never have to touch my stupid broken laptop. Everything is controlled from the CP. My only complaint is that I didn't want the SHAZAAM button to be mounted anywhere on the machine. It was not authentic to have a non-arcade original button that does nothing but access hidden features mounted on The ZOOM MACHINE. I tried wiring the SHAZAAM button up with the 1st player button, but every time I gave myself a coin (SHAZAAM + 5) I would automatically get forced into the game (the result of pressing the 1st player button). So I just duct taped some wires together and hid the SHAZAAM button under the CP cover. Meh. It works. Maybe after I get a coin door I'll change it.
This is a picture of the SHAZAAM button. It is mounted on the backside of the control panel so that it is hidden. The paragraph preceding this one was written a few days ago. Since then I have made the decision to change the name of the SHAZZAM button to the ZOOM button.