Simple Genesis/Megadrive gamepad button jump mod.

[Rebel-CD32]

I always wanted to perform mods like these on some pads I have. I bought a soldering iron to start doing it and the bloody thing melted and I gave up on learning to solder. It was probably a faulty soldering iron though so I'm going to give it another shot when I can afford to pick up a new one. I always wanted to map one of the buttons to double as Fire+Up at the same time, as well as the regular Up button, because some games like Golden Axe use Fire+Up for jump and I don't think that's been patched with WHDLoad.

Also remember you can modify a Mega Drive/Genesis pad to have full 8-button functionality, but the only game that makes use of all 8 buttons is ADoom. Flashback and Hired Guns both use a modified 3 or 6 button pad, making use of the Start and A buttons, but not the X, Y, Z and Mode buttons as ADoom does.

[Rebel-CD32]

You can get Playstation adapters which emulate the CD32 pad and the mouse at the same time, let you program combos, use one analogue stick as a digital joystick and the other as a mouse, there's not much they can't do (except magically emulate a keyboard). AmigaManiac sells the adapters with Paul Willingham's code here - http://www.amigamaniac.com/psx2db9.html

One adapter that would be welcome would be a Sega Phaser adapter to us in the Amiga light gun games. They have all been patched with WHDLoad to use the same gun interface, the adapter was discussed here  http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=21195

Love the look of the Master System pad mod!

[Rebel-CD32]

So this has two 9-pin outputs, right?  There isn't a picture and the page doesn't seem to indicate that.

These adapters only have one 9-pin plug, so they're not designed to control the mouse and joystick at the same time unfortunately. I don't know if it's a limitation of the PIC chip they use but I did always think it'd be nice if a single chip could control both inputs, I had my own ideas about a kind of hub for the CD32 which lets you plug in Playstation pads, USB mouse, keyboard, and serial devices and would plug into the two 9pin ports and the Aux port. Just dreams though, I can't build hardware.

How does HG use the extra buttons ? What are they for ?

I haven't tried it since I don't have a modified pad myself, but apparently when using the joypad option you don't need to use a mouse, and the buttons perform different actions. You can download the instruction manual here - http://psygnosisamiga.free.fr/games/hiredguns/instructions2.pdf