The original Zaxxon had 1 four way joystick and a fire button, not enough control for the Mame monster so I went around planning to create a new control panal.  My previous Arcade machine - long gone now to the big tip in the sky )-: was converted to run a Mega Drive with the controls hard wired (soldered) on to the game pads PCB so I knew this type of conversion could work.

I investigated doing the same with 2 joysticks on the PC but I realised there would be some shortcommings so I decided to create the new panel based on a stripped down PC keyboard.
Stripped Keyboard Controller Don't try this at home kids, shit this was hard work !!! My approach was to follow the key matrix from the inards of the keyboard back to the 20 or so pins on the keyboard controller - ARRRGGHHH.

With all the recent Mame / Arcade conversions out there, these guys sell a dedicated PC keyboard controller capable of being programmed for any keys, at $99.00 dollars (+ getting the thing to London) would be much more expensive than an old PC keyboard (£10 max) however the ability to program keys selectivly is a great bonus at the moment my control panale is wired as follows

Player 1

Up, Down, Left, Right
as on the keyboard

4 action buttons, alt, ctrl, V & U ??
(Hey that's the way it turned out)

Generic Keys

P1 = 1 / P2 = 2 / Coin = 3

Enter and Escape

Hacked Logitech trackball
with three mouse buttons

Player 2

Up = G / Down = ? / Left = ? Right = ?

4 Actions buttons, B, N, M, Y

As you can see quite a full house !!  This combinaton enables most emulators to be played without the need for another PC keyboard. One downside, the keys are fixed (I cannot easily, and do not want to attempt) to change any keys, hey it's not a problem until I fire up Callus which does not support the mappings of keys within the emulator as M.A.M.E does so I pretty stuffed, at the moment if I want to play Street Fighter I have to connect another keyboard, put some credits in, then switch back to my controller - a bit of a pain., and a health hazard as I hit the PCB on the monitor giving me a 240V shock !!!!

 I've been looking for a solution to this problem for a while.  There does not seem to be any software out there that can remap the keys I want (Bill over at MS does a little Kernal toy which is the right idea but only does certain keys, i.e. the Windows key etc.) I've seen a hardware $50 box that allows 2 keyboards to be connected at the same time but the guys in the US would not sell to me as I'm in the UK )-:

Kill Me Coin Mech

If anyone knows a possible solution for my problem, please drop me a line