arcade controls and 74HC165 shift register

Hi,

I am trying to make a new control board for a broken arcade "claw/crane" machine.

The controls in the machine are arcade joystick and buttons that are basically SPDT switches all connected to the same ground wire. The original board has a harness where the "hot" lines go as inputs to the board, they are 5v when the switch closes the 5v gets connected to the common ground wire and somehow the board detects this. each switch has its own wire so they are paraell. i am trying to figure out how to connect this to the shift register from the tutorials i have seen the pins of the shift register expect 5v coming in , so what do i connect to the arcade controls? if i connect the "hot" wire from the switches to the pins on the register nothing happens, any ideas? thanks.

you need to pull up the wires going from the switches to the register, each line gets a resistor connected to 5v

you probably want something between 1k and 5k ohm, then the shift register can see if they are high (1) or low (0)

Osgeld:
you need to pull up the wires going from the switches to the register, each line gets a resistor connected to 5v

Pull-up resistor - Wikipedia

you probably want something between 1k and 5k ohm, then the shift register can see if they are high (1) or low (0)

thanks after a lot of banging my head against the wall i stumbled on that wiki page and i realized i had been working from an example in the shift register page where all the pins were pulled down to 0 using a 10k resistor. so i reasoned i should just connect the 10k resistor to +5 instead of gnd and that would pull them high, then connect the ground to the common line of the arcade controls. that worked.
thanks for the help though