Some of you may know that keyboard encoders exist:
http://www.ultimarc.com/ipac1.html
there are others, such as the keywhiz, hagstrom encoder, etc.
These serve a great benefit to this community, if adapted to the correct purpose. The problem of limitations that keyboards provide, I.E. not enough button presses, difficult to do two player runs, etc, prevents great and entertaining runs from being created.
I was thinking of taking this idea, and using it to create a keyboard encoder with superplay functionality.
Imagine with me for a moment -
You have a box that plugs into the computer, and on it contains the necessary mapings that don't exist on a typical SNES controller, save, speed-up, slow down, pause, frame advance, and more.
It has connectors for 2 SNES controllers. Inside this black box, the SNES controllers are decoded, and made into keyboard commands.
On this box is a picture of 2 SNES controllers, leds for each button.
The box operates in two modes. In normal mode, the SNES controller acts as a typical controller. In frame advance mode, it captures the current state of the controller. Press the button once, the button is held, press it again to release. Leds visually tell you which buttons are on and off.
I have done keyboard encoders for my various MAME machines, shown here:
http://www.msu.edu/~thomso25/myapt2.jpg
http://www.msu.edu/~thomso25/works.jpg
Adapting the code to do this would be time consuming, but doable. I obviously would not be able to create or sell many of these, as the super play communities are smaller and more dispersed than the BYOAC community. It would have to be on an on demand, for the more prominent video creators.
www.arcadecontrols.com
Some information as to the process this would take:
http://panda.cs.ndsu.nodak.edu/~achapwes/PICmicro/keyboard/atkeyboard.html
http://www.gamesx.com/controldata/nessnes.htm
What do you all think?
