RetroZone USB NES controller kit

[logik]

Well, I just converted my first NES controller tonight. Soildering all those little wires and fitting it back in the case was a pain, but it woks awesome!

I bought the retro kit from here: http://www.sealiecomputing.com/retrozone/nintendo.html

I bought a used controller from gamestop for $.99, and after about an hour or some, I was gaming away using rocknesx on my mediacenter PC. It's way better to play the games with the original controllers. I highly reccomend these!

Now just have to do my snes and my MAME machine will be ready to handle everything!

[daywane]

have you tried anything like this before? how hard is it? how were the docs?

[Hoagie_one]

i recently converted a snes 4 player adapter to a Parallel cable so you can use 4 snes controllers on your computer....but i miswired it and only 3 ports work, so only 3 player games

[logik]

This was a first for me. I have very basic soildering skills. They send a diagram with it for you to follow. Its an easy conversion, but if you can't get a controller cheap, just spend the extra $10 and get one pre made from them.

[logik]

Here is a write-up and step by step:
http://www.joystiq.com/entry/7817137582525561

[jcroach]

Here is a write-up and step by step:
http://www.joystiq.com/entry/7817137582525561

logik, did ou do that write-up?  Very nice and easy to understand.  I've been bouncing around the idea of doing this myself.  We're discussing this very same issues over on this thread: http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,29529.0.html 

[logik]

No, I did not do that. I stumbled upon that a few weeks ago. It sold me on doing it myself.

[Silhouette]

If I bought one of their RetroKits and installed it into my own Four Score, would it work like the one they sell, or do their Four Scores have different adaptors?

[Dr Gori]

If you request the kit for a fourscore, they will send you one.  I just did one, and as you can read a basic schematic, you should be fine.  They make it pretty fool proof.

It works great, and it is more fun to play using the original controllers.

I plan on converting other controllers to.  Im in the process of converting an Atari 2600 into a classic home gaming machine, and will have most of the original controllers available for playing for the respective system.

[tetsujin]

You know, at first the idea of USB-izing an NES controller seemed mildly entertaining at best...  Not overwhelming when 10 button gamepads with dual analog are commonplace - but I've been thinking it over and came to a few conclusions.

First, after using the original NES controllers again on an NES game for the first time in probably 10 years I realized that I really do like them.  Great, responsive D-pad, much better than my old 3rd party NES controller, and better than PSX controllers.

Second, if I use them for guests to play multi-player games, some guests will be a lot more comfortable with a simple controller like the NES, which won't have significantly more buttons than they'll need.  NES controllers are nice for other reasons, too: they're compact, rugged (esp. compared to controllers with analog sticks)

So now I'm gonna do this, too!  But instead of buying Retrozone stuff I'm going to program and install a PIC myself (a lot cheaper that way!  Maybe $10 worth of parts, plus the controller itself.)

[Tahnok]

So now I'm gonna do this, too!  But instead of buying Retrozone stuff I'm going to program and install a PIC myself (a lot cheaper that way!  Maybe $10 worth of parts, plus the controller itself.)

Please let us know how that goes! If you read that article that logik posted, they were trying to create an open-source (or, atleast free) code for the PICs. I would love to do this if I could create it from scratch.

[tetsujin]

So now I'm gonna do this, too!  But instead of buying Retrozone stuff I'm going to program and install a PIC myself (a lot cheaper that way!  Maybe $10 worth of parts, plus the controller itself.)

Please let us know how that goes! If you read that article that logik posted, they were trying to create an open-source (or, atleast free) code for the PICs. I would love to do this if I could create it from scratch.

I'll likely do mine by removing the IC from the NES controller and connecting the NES controls unencoded to the PIC.  (Since I want to convert an NES pad, rather than connect it to an adaptor, the intermediate encode-decode step doesn't have any value.)  In other words, I'm programming the PIC to be a regular USB joystick encoder and connecting it to the NES controller's switches, bypassing the original electronics.  That makes it possible using only sample code that's already available.

Adding in code to read NES controllers (allowing the solution to be plugged into an unaltered NES controller like the Retrozone parts) wouldn't be too tough, the protocol is incredibly simple.  I don't know if it's something I'm likely to tackle any time soon, though, just because I have plenty of USB/PIC development on my to-do list as it is...

[Ravant]

Here's an idea... I'm planning on taking all of my older games (From Atari 2600,NES, SNES, Genesis, N64, and PS1), sticking them on a hard drive, and wiring up a bunch of controller converters to connect them to my PC. Are there any USB converters for Atari, SNES, Genesis, N64, or the PS1?

[tetsujin]

Here's an idea... I'm planning on taking all of my older games (From Atari 2600,NES, SNES, Genesis, N64, and PS1), sticking them on a hard drive, and wiring up a bunch of controller converters to connect them to my PC. Are there any USB converters for Atari, SNES, Genesis, N64, or the PS1?

SNES and PS1 are readily available.  The PS1 adaptors are on the shelves in Radio Shack, even.

As for the others, I don't know.  For Atari you could use any generic gamepad encoder.  For Genesis, I think Retrozone has something.

[logik]

I have n64 converters. They are called Boom. The convert n64 and psx. Wok great. Another option is a thing called the adaptoid. Its a little pricy, but supposed to work great with the n64 controllers. Retrozone makes a kit for the atari and genisis.

[nipsmg]

Does anyone know if these would be usable on an Xbox?

As far as I know, the xbox controllers are just USB HID Controllers.  You can chop the connector off, wire up a USB Connector, and plug them right into a PC and use them ( I know people who did this to play Halo PC).

[tetsujin]

Does anyone know if these would be usable on an Xbox?

As far as I know, the xbox controllers are just USB HID Controllers.  You can chop the connector off, wire up a USB Connector, and plug them right into a PC and use them ( I know people who did this to play Halo PC).

I hate to reply with such vague and uncertain information, but it's possible they won't.  It's possible the X-Box controllers provide something extra in their HID descriptors which X-Box looks for, but which a PC ignores.  It's also possible that when software sees a gamepad without the proper number of axes and buttons it'll just refuse to work with the device, or worse.  So the fact that X-Box controllers work on other USB hosts doesn't mean necessarily that other USB HID devices will work correctly when connected to X-Box.

Then again, it could be they'll work just fine.

You could buy this cable if you want to try it out without cutting or soldering:

http://www.lik-sang.com/info.php?category=0&products_id=2154

It seems that people use this cable to connect USB storage devices (for use as memory cards) and keyboards and mice (for XBox-Linux), so probably USB gamepads would work on XBox-Linux as well - but I don't know about whether USB gamepads will work properly in standard XBox Games.

(EDIT):  See this page:
http://euc.jp/periphs/xbox-controller.ja.html

In particular:

You can connect the controller to a PC by ripping the cable and soldering a USB connector. However, the controller does not work either with the generic USB joystick driver or with the generic mass storage driver, because the interface class/subclass values are strange, the HID descriptor and the HID report descriptor are missing, and so on.

This suggests that special drivers are required when using the X-Box controller on any other OS (which does seem to be the case) and that, probably, other gamepads won't work on the X-Box unless they have the exact same report format.

[Scott84]

i recently converted a snes 4 player adapter to a Parallel cable so you can use 4 snes controllers on your computer....but i miswired it and only 3 ports work, so only 3 player games

On SNES, you hooked up the multitap to the second port on the SNES. The first port was used for 1Player

[Scott84]

I have n64 converters. They are called Boom. The convert n64 and psx. Wok great. Another option is a thing called the adaptoid. Its a little pricy, but supposed to work great with the n64 controllers. Retrozone makes a kit for the atari and genisis.

Did you buy 4 and play 4 players? I want to take those BOOM things apart, and attach them to an n64 console. Saw the front off, insert the boom Connectors where the ports should go, and put it below the monitor on my mame machine. Would also like to do that for the SNES and NES (4 Score)

[logik]

So far all I have is 2 with 2 controllers. Don't really play multi player games, yet. But I have read that other people have used all 4.

[spiffyshoes]

Does anyone know if these would be usable on an Xbox?

As far as I know, the xbox controllers are just USB HID Controllers.

[tetsujin]

So now I'm gonna do this, too!  But instead of buying Retrozone stuff I'm going to program and install a PIC myself (a lot cheaper that way!  Maybe $10 worth of parts, plus the controller itself.)

Please let us know how that goes! If you read that article that logik posted, they were trying to create an open-source (or, atleast free) code for the PICs. I would love to do this if I could create it from scratch.

Hey,

I finally did it!  Maybe I can post some photos later...

I did screw up, though - I installed a version of my firmware that hadn't been tested on Windows - so my first finished USB NES pad works on Linux and Mac OS (8.6 and 10.3) but not on Windows XP.

I think the problem is that I tried to get too fancy.  I used string descriptors on the buttons so that (in theory, at least) software would be able to identify the buttons as "A, B, Select, Start" rather than "1, 2, 3, 4".  But none of the systems I've tested with seem to support this (The buttons are always identified by the system by number, not by name) and I think just the presence of those descriptors caused the gamepad to fail to work on Windows.  (I saw similar effects on other systems when the descriptors were organized slightly differently...)  So the bad news is, this first gamepad will never work on Windows unless I take the PIC out, put in a new one, and program it with new firmware.  But the good news is, I never use Windows (more to the point, I made this controller specifically for use with my Apple Powerbook when travelling - so the fact that the first one produced has this incompatibility isn't so devastating.), and I'm planning to make a second one with simpler (and hopefully more universally compatible) USB firmware.

It's really been one hell of a learning experience.  All the things I tried, that caused various incompatibilities or quirks on different OSes...  Like I originally had the axes go from 0 to 255 and center on 127.  That worked fine, but on Mac it didn't automatically know where center was until it'd been calibrated.  (So I switched to -127 to 127 for the range..)  I also tried packing the whole report in one byte (2 bits for X axis, 2 bits for Y axis, 4 bits for buttons) - which worked fine on Mac and Windows but caused Linux to spaz out.  I wish I had access to more OS versions for testing, I'd like to develop my USB code to be more compatible...

I went with my initial plan for the conversion - pulled the controller's original 4021 shift register, and inserted a surface-mount-style PIC16C745.  There were a lot of wires to solder...  That was the worst of it.  It sort of made me appreciate Retrozone's approach of taking the pre-encoded data from the original gamepad circuit (so many fewer wires to connect!).  But most likely I'll do future controllers the same way.