PSCD32 Development Diary

Testing it with some games

Brian The Lion CD32 works an absolute treat with it! It uses three of the face buttons for jump, swipe and special powers. Bubble and Squeak CD32 has jump, fire, and call Squeak. The Chaos Engine CD32 has buttons all over the place. So many in fact, that you have to hold certain pairs of face buttons to do certain tasks, despite the FF and Rew buttons being used for the basically-useless rotate-on-the-spot move. Guardian CD32 is fantastic. It's slow, annoying, shallow, and sounds and looks a bit pants, but the controller just fits into it effortlessly. Hell, all of these games play so much better with the pad than either a joystick or a CD32 originalpad. If somebody had made something like the PSCD32 back in the day... nobody would have cared because the Commodore and Sony eras didn't really overlap, but at least everybody could have enjoyed the better pad. Game after game falls to the PSCD32's wonderful firmware... But then. Arabian Nights doesn't work. It gets stuck at the language selection screen. This isn't the CD32 version though, so the normal two-button interface should be working. Manually grounding Fire with a probe pin gets me past it, but the PSCD32 isn't able to trigger it. Blast. Looks like the 47R resistor is still too safe for this task. Urgh!! Well, it's back to the soldering iron. Let's see just what is needed for this game to start. I wouldn't mind, but Arabian Nights is (traditionally at least) one of the rare Good Amiga Games. I'm stacking up and soldering these 47R resistors in parallel to reduce the resistance of the Fire pin. This is very professional as you can see. It still isn't working. That's really annoying. I've replaced the resistor with a wire. There's no way this can't work. It doesn't work. UGH. Before I do anything else drastic, let's try it with my real CD32 pad, just in case this game is Weird. Bingo. (Actually, it was my bro's suggestion to switch the pads over.) It turns out that Arabian Nights just doesn't like real CD32 pads. Let's look online and see if anyone else has had this trouble... http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=68201 https://assemblergames.com/threads/amiga-cd32-joypad-frustrations.47660/ Yep. It just doesn't work with a CD32 pad. It must do something with the JOYMODE pin, expecting to be able to leave it in some state that a CD32 pad doesn't like. Let's put that safety resistor back in place! Desoldering the original resistor with the trimmed legs meant I had to throw it away and use one of these long-legged spares. This is why I always overbuy each component by one, if I'm able to! It's working with every game I can throw at it now! Super Obliteration, Lionheart, Project X, Apidya, the Turrican series, R-Type, AlienĀ³, Bubba & Stix, Banshee, the works! That's a great feeling. Now it's time to do something that I've been doing all along but I'm going to be explicit about doing right now. BACK. UP. YOUR. WORK. Find a trusted friend who likes to keep hold of things and just pass them a disc with your projects on it. That is so much better than nothing.