N64 to 5200?

[joeybastard]

Let me start off by saying, I have little to no actual electrical knowledge. I screw around and can get stuff to work most of the time.

 

I picked up a cheapo N64 3rd party controller just to open it up and see how the analog stick worked. It has 2 pots just like a 5200 stick. That got me thinking so I took a spare 5200 cable I had and wired up the 2 fire, start, reset and pause buttons to various buttons on this N64 controller. Everything worked just fine.

 

The question for those of you with the knowledge is, how do I measure the resistence of the pots in this thing? I'm guessing that if I can, I should be able to make something to make the stick work with the 5200 too. As an experiment, I hooked up the 5200 pot wires to this stick but it just registered as the stick pushed constantly to the right, moving the stick produced no results. I have a multimeter but I don't really know how to use it properly. Any ideas?

[hex65000]

Measuring resistance...

 

Okay, on the x & y pots you have 3 pins coming off of it. the pins on the left and right are either ends of your resistive strip and the center is your tap. (typical configuration, you can probably fool me with a variant if you looked hard enough)

 

First, disconnect one of the ends and your tap connecetion from a pot. You have to take the resistor out of the circuit in order to measure resistance properly.

 

Set your DMM to ohms.

 

Measure across the left and right pins. Adjust your scale if necessary. This number will tell you what the (rough) maximum resistance of the pot will give you. Now you can do the same thing with a 5200 stick, but I'm betting that there's documentatioon on what those pots' max resistance should be.

 

Does that help?

 

Hex.

[ I'm doin' the best that I can... now run away! ]

[joeybastard]

Yeah that does help thanks. The 5200 is pretty well documented but real N64 sticks use a photelectric thing for the analog almost like a trakball(at least according to some website I found) and this cheapo knockoff has pots. I figured I'd need to measure the resistance myself because I wasn't going to find specs on a cheapo controller.

 

Thanks!