NES/PSX/PC hack questions...

[Fuzzguitar]

Hi,

I have a gutted N.E.S. console and am wondering if I could leave the pads plugged into it and then do a PSX pad hack (or any pad for the matter- I just have one and a USB adapter handy) on the inside so that I could use the NES pads on a PC for emulators. Then the PSX pad connector cable could go out the back of the console and into the PC's USB port.

Not only would it hide the hack job but I think it would look pretty cool too, or another idea is to remove the console's pad connectors and mount them nicely in a spare bay on the PC. So instead of having say a CD drive you would have an interface to plug in the NES pads - and the hack could be mounted inside the PC easily too.

I've never tried a pad hack and would like to know if on NES pads the pinouts correspond to a particular input, I mean, there are 8 inputs on the pad;

UP/DOWN/LEFT/RIGHT/BA/BB/START/SELECT

...but only 7 pin connectors from memory

Is this because the input stream gets turned from parallel to serial by the pad's circuitry?

If anyone knows what I would need to do please fill me in okay! I'm sick of coming across broken NES consoles. Sure they can sometimes be fixed by cleaning and bending pins but it only happens again later and I actually think emulators play better on a TV. Especially for us PAL folk, emu's allow us to play games full screen and speed for the first time!

Recently I modded my Master Sytem to do 60HZ which worked a treat and now I'd like to get this project done. What do you think - could it work?

[abrannan]

There's a project somewhere for interfacing NES and SNES pads with the parallel port.  You could connect the front connectors from the NES into the parallel port and use the joystick driver from the project to run them (with joy2key if the emulator only accepts keyboard input)  Unfortunatley I can't remember the name of the project.  It was mentioned on this board a while back though, search the archives.

[Fuzzguitar]

Yeah, there are a few things like that. Ages ago I built the Direct Pad Pro adapter for master system/parallel port but  just could not get the drivers to work. Having said that, I have Windows XP now so I might consider that again.

Also, the PSX emu "It might be NES" worked well for me a while back...I could probably squeeze a PSone (the smaller white version) into an NES case hmmm...

[HempHacker]

The pins on the NES and PSX do not correspond directly to the buttons. They use a protocal to send the button data. Yes the NES uses a parallel to serial protocal. USB adapters for NES pads are avaliable, and tons of them are avaliable for the PSX.
The idea about installing the controller connector into a drive bay has been done before, and they look nice, especially when they use the power and reset buttons along with the red LED. Check http://www.junkmachine.com for NESPC's or the NES drive thingy, they've got alot of info on using the NES with a PC.