Well, I've been playing this an absolute ton. I never manage to make that much time for games but I've been playing this almost daily where I can. It pains me to stop playing this to work on a panel for it but I think it will be great on a Vewlix
I've collected a couple more Hercules Inpulse 200 MK1 controllers:
The first one I got as an Amazon Warehouse deal and that was £65 but it looked brand new. I then won a second used one on ebay for about £45 but the seller said it was NLA and refunded me
Prices after then seemed to creep up and I picked up two more used ones from ebay for £50 and £65.
Why three controllers? Well one I want to keep for use at my desk/PC a) for having a quick blast and b) for testing custom made tracks on the fly. The second controller is the one I'm planning on transplanting the guts from and into the Vewlix panel. The third one is just for spares and/or for
if when I fuck something up
I'm just in the initial planning stages at the moment but I thought I would share in case anyone has any input/ideas/tech info etc.
It's early days but I'm thinking of a layout something like this:
Two jog wheels on the left and right, currently the same distance apart as the original MIDI controller. The four buttons at the bottom are UDLR for menu navigation. Top right is Pause (Menu), press again to continue. Top left is restart track.
Back off the controller:
You can see the PCB was original fabricated as a square and one quarter then makes the bottom right PCB. Makes sense from a manufacturing point of view.
Bottom right PCB unscrewed and flipped over:
The square buttons on the original controller press onto those tact switches. They're common ground and will be easy to solder wires to. Any six will do as they can all be remapped in the game software.
There is an encoder on the jog wheel and that looks to be detected by a set of IR optics in the same way that a spinner does:
I'm hoping I can desolder these components, extend them with wires and then mount them to the Vewlix panel. I'm going to try and mock this up for a start before I go any further because it will require a rethink otherwise.
The one part I really don't get is how the 'touch' input from the jog wheels work. There is a single wire for each jog wheel (marked JOG_TOUCH_DA and JOG_TOUCH_DB on the PCB) and these are connected to a piece of single core wire that pushes against a steel cylinder that the shaft of the jog wheel is mounted in.
This is the other side of the PCB:
The IC nearest is a LM393 which apparently is a Low Offset Voltage Dual Comparator. I don't know if this has anything to do with the operation?
With no input to press I can only assume that the wire attached to each JOG_TOUCH_DA and JOG_TOUCH_DB is somehow sensing a touch through vibration? Does anyone know?
I'm going to see if I can also replicate this functionality with the wires extended.
Thats where I am currently. I'm going to try and extend the above wires next to see if this is a goer or not.
Any input gratefully received!
Finally, I started to record (in very bad quality) a couple of games as I'm trying to get a few mates into it too. I've got a few videos in a playlist [
here] but I'll post a couple here too. There's quite a variety of styles to play and there's some DLC coming soon too, can't wait
I'm no pro but it's great fun trying to improve. Some tracks look near impossible for a start but it's great once you can get into them. This dificulty is easy compared to some of the higher level XD ranked tracks
View: https://youtu.be/X2pUXTy7DEg
View: https://youtu.be/LQXqVfugxU4
View: https://youtu.be/rh-b6FeYipQ
View: https://youtu.be/hUJtJ6vS2lY
I used 
I then extended the wires to 1.5m long as this should be ample for the final wiring loom, everything still works 
. Without too much drama I managed to knock the below up in a couple of hours. I spent longer trying to get JST NH connectors into the library than actually doing the PCB design. In the end I went for JST XH as they're in the library already and actually they worked out to be a better choice.