Louthrax asked about the function of the colored buttons on my interface box.
Well, technically, these function as extra game controller buttons:
- yellow/green = button3/button4 for joystick-A
- blue/red = button3/button4 for joystick-B
While I took the Windows screenshot above, I hold the yellow button down while testing joystick A (=first Game Controller). You can see it lights up in red to show the specific button works.
The reason I built it this way is because the shift register (IC) I used had 8 lines for each joystick, so I had 2 spare lines (because 6 are used for the MSX joystick). MSX software within the emulator cannot do anything with this of course, because the MSX can only handle 2 buttons for each joystick.
However, the emulator can bind these buttons to special functions. For example, I have set up the OpenMSX emulator as follows:
bind "joy1 button2 down" "main_menu_toggle"
bind "joy1 button3 down" "toggle fullscreen"
bind "joy2 button2 down" "toggle console"
bind "joy2 button3 down" "reset"
This way the emulator can be used without touching the PC that runs the emulator. I just use a normal PC, but this can be especially interesting when you use a 'Intel Compute Stick' or something similar to run the MSX emulator together with this interface box.
