The pictures are misleading (and are only examples); I only own the controllers. Thank you for the link though. I have enough time between Christmas festivities to post this little potential fix.
I did some more testing and fiddling and I think I found the solution. This might be useful for the 8 or so other people out there with these pads.
It started when I booted up the PSX RayStorm normally, and then switched to the Sunsoft pad. The screen kept on repeatedly flashing "CONTROLLER DISCONNECTED" and I could move in the brief moments this wasn't flashing. So it at least tipped me off that mine might be a connection issue.
I opened up one of the Sunsoft Sunstation pads just to see what it looked like on the inside:
It's a pretty hefty circuit board inside, which one would expect given the sturdiness of the controller and the features on it.
Maybe some more tech savvy folks can help me here. Looking at this particular pad's wiring, I did notice this:
The orange wire was exposed. I do not know if this can actually cause problems, whether through exposure to the elements (???) or whatnot. But all the same it stuck out to me.
According to this image (
from this guide):
The orange wire takes care of commands, so perhaps this wire is damaged preventing the controller from inputting any commands?
Nonetheless, I thought perhaps something could be done to improve the connectivity to the PS2's controller port.
I switched to the other pad and tried cleaning the contacts to no avail. Then I thought there might be a way to bypass plugging the controller into the PS2 directly. Luckily, the PS2 Slim I bought came with an
extension cord for the Dualshock. I plugged the Sunstation into this extension cord, and plugged the extension cord into the PS2, and the pad now works!
The one that is continuing to have problems is the pad I photographed up above. Could the wire have something to do with it? It works for a little while while plugged into the extension, but soon usually conks out. I hope it doesn't have to do with my opening of the controller shell. I'll have to open it again to see if anything is out of place.
I can also confirm that the Sunsoft Sunstation is compatible both with PS1 and PS2 games - at the very least it worked with all of my PS1 games and I tested it with Capcom Classics Collection Vol. 2 and Taito Legends 2. This is a big plus for shooters on those compilations.
