Dazz's Game Not Over

My original plans were to build a metal dance pad from scratch for less then I could purchase one for. After reading may tutorials and scoping out eBay I finally decided to go with a pre-built dance pad. This dance pad was a Blue Spark metal dance pad that was originally built for Playstation 2 & Xbox. Usually these sell for $120+ and rough estimates on building my own were about $90 - $100. I was able to get this one brand new off eBay for $9.99 + 30.00 shipping. I think going this route was much more cost friendly then building one...

I could have just converted the Xbox inputs into USB, but every USB pad we have used seems to have a lag while playing. I decided to rip the PS2 and Xbox wiring out of the dance pad and rewire it with Cat5 (standard networking cable). I forgot to take pictures of the teardown and re-wiring of the dance pad. I then added 2 Cat5 ports to the underside of the control panel for easy access. The Cat5 is then wired directly into the Ultimarc I-PAC4 keyboard encoder. This makes the arrows extremely responsive with no lag at all and this works beautifully.

Cat5 wired directly into the I-PAC4

Cat5 ports on underside of control panel

I wired the arrow leds up to the 5v on the Opti-Pac and the leds worked great. The only thing is that the input was seriously draining the voltage on the Opti-Pac. I didn't like how this drained it so I ended up removing the 5v connection until I can learn a little more about electrical currents. I'll eventually wire them back up because they were a big hit with the kids and their friends.

Arrow leds light up.

Completed metal dance pad conversion.

Metal dance pad connected to MAME cabinet.

Afterthoughts
Overall this conversion was extremely easy and easy on the pocketbook. It was just a matter of splicing the existing arrow wires and connecting each to the correct Cat5 wire. Using the I-PAC4 makes for more accurate button press and making it an enjoyable gaming experience.