Greetings and salutations, comrades!

 You know I love my videogames, especially old ones.  There's something magical about holding that old controller and popping those cartridges into the deck.  Yet, a lot of us don't have a working Nintendo anymore.  Some of us have one, but loathe digging through our huge piles of cartridges.  Because of this, I planned to do a segment this week about a Nintendo controller.  It's one you can build yourself, with just one NES pad, a soldering iron, a screwdriver, and a kit that's available from The RetroZone.  The kit will let you convert your NES pad over to USB and use it with your computer.  That's only half the combination though...and in the other part of this tutorial, I'll show you how to configure a neat piece of software to work with an even neater website to give you pure old-school gaming action.  So, if you're ready to build that controller, grab a soldering iron and some Snapple, we're digging in. 

 So the first thing on the order is your NES joypad.  Mine is an NES-004, just your standard two-button official joypad.   I've already cleaned it and taken it apart, and I suggest that if you want to use this thing for real, you clean yours really well.  For the instructions on how to do that, you can visit my other tutorial.  I've got you covered!

So after you've cleaned your controller, put it back together, make sure it works well, then disassemble it once more.

Here's the scary part.  Grab a pair of pliers or scissors and cut the wires.  In most cases, you'll either want to trim the wires back to 1" or 6".  In the official RetroUSB tutorial, they will trim the wires to the longer length and the controller chip will rest in position A below.  Because I want there to be little interference and want to protect the IC as much as possible, I'm putting it in position B.  You'll see how this plays out later.

So after you scarily hack the wires off, you want to strip the insulation off of about 2 millimeters of wiring.  For freedom loving Americans and those who hate metric, that's under 1/10th of an inch.  You don't want a lot of insulation off because we're trying to prevent crosstalk on the wires and want to make sure nothing gets crossed when we put the chip down in the controller.

The kit from RetroUSB looks like this:

Take the kit and safely pinch it in your Helping Hands.  You don't have one, you say?  Well, Radioshack is great for that sort of thing!  To get fast service, tell the fine person behind the counter that you're interested in buying at least 4 cell phones.

The USB wires were a bit loose on my board, probably from shipping, so I resoldered them in a bit more of a secure way.  There was enough solder on the pads that I didn't actually needto use anymore of my solder though, so that's a huge plus.

Once I got those resoldered, I turned my attention to the ones connecting the board to the IC itself.  Those ones are a little trickier, since they exist on both sides.  In the interest of keeping all sane, RetroUSB provided a nice graphic with their order page that shows you how to solder those other wires.  To make it easier for anyone who's interested though, I've colored the diagram and made some notations to indicate the orientation of the board.  MSPaint to the rescue:

Alright, so let's begin!  I did the USB wires again, then the brown and white. 

That took care of the front.  Then I flipped it over and did the ones on the back.

 Okay, so now the hard part is over!  Congratulations!  The  soldering is done.  Turn off your iron.  But how do we attach the chip to the board so it's not sliding around all over the place?  Bust out your hot glue guns and get cracking!

I put a dollop on the underside of the board.  Not too much to completely bury it in glue, but it's not coming loose unless I rappel off the side of a cliff with the controller.

That's an interesting question...do they make NES themed carabiners?

As you can see above, I also glued the wire in place and bent it around the guides for the controller.  I then did the next natural thing:

Only put a few screws in though!  You don't know if you're going to have to take it apart again yet, and a number of things can foil our plans for world domination.  The next step in our glorious journey is to connect it to a computer.  Since I use a Mac in most of my experiments, I happened to have USB Prober.  If you're on a Linux system, you could tail your system log and look for the same details.  Essentially, we're looking for an entry from a detected device called "Retropad".

Some troubleshooting

- My Mac is giving me a message saying "USB Overcurrent"

- My Windows Machine is saying "USB Power Exceeded"

- I seem to have electrocuted myself.  Repeatedly.  Ow.

This is because of a short on the brown or white wires.  When those wires are crossed, it's essentially taking 5 volts of power and running them back through the ground line.  I recommend unplugging the controller immediately and checking the wiring.  Make sure you didn't accidentally solder white and brown together, or make sure they are not grounding out against something else.

-My system is not detecting it at all.

-My system intermittently detects the joypad.

Ensure that white and brown are connected properly, and the USB wires are on correctly.  If you still can't get anything out of the chip, desolder the wires leading to the board and try again.  If you still can't get the chip to be detected by your computer, try another computer. 

If you have a multimeter handy, you should be able to measure +5 volts on the red USB wire when you ground it off the black USB wire.  There should also be +5 volts between the brown wire and the white wire leading to the joypad.  If you have no voltage on the USB wires, make sure your USB cord is good.  Rip one off of something else and use it.  Try a new USB port as well.  If you have no voltage on brown and white to the joypad, check red and black on the USB.  That's where the power comes from after all

If you can't get it yet, you may have to contact the folks at RetroZone to get a new kit.

So you've got everything connected.  Now what?

USB Overdrive X and JoytoKey

For the Mac, there's a lovely program called USB Overdrive.  Made by Senlick, it lets you map keypad presses on a joypad to actual keystrokes on the keyboard.  It's shareware, so you can download it and try it before you buy it.  Don't be afraid, it doesn't actually cost a lot. ($20).

Start USB Overdrive and enter the main menu.

To map a button press to a keystroke, select "Joystick" up above the box where it says "Global Settings".  Click the checkbox where it says "Overdrive Enabled".  When you push "Left" on the controller, "Stick Left" should turn bold on the keypad.  Make sure "Stick Left" is highlighted like above, then click in the "Keystroke" box.  Push the left arrow key.  It should say "left" in that box now.

Do the same thing for up, down, and right, with their corresponding keys on the keyboard.  Unless you're playing a really cruel trick on someone, you want to map these to whatever the button press is.

On my version of the Retropad, here's how I had it mapped:

If you use Windows, there's a free piece of software called JoytoKey written by Ryo Ohkubo, that while old and apparently hard to find, is very good.  Since it's rarer than unicorn eyelashes, I have decided to mirror it here.  Thanks, Ryo!

Once you download that zip file, uncompress it and open the folder.  You'll see a Readme and an executable.  Run the executable, and this window will pop up:

Click where it says "Auto Setting Wizard".  The system will prompt you for what keys you wish to correspond to joypad presses.  In order, push the following:

LEFT, RIGHT, UP, DOWN, CTRL, ENTER, Z, X.

For the rest of the keys, you can click on "Skip", and there are a LOT of those :D

After you're done doing that, your window should now look like this:

If you don't want to use this, there's also a piece of software called "Xpadder" which can do similar things.  There's a good tutorial on using it over here.   Thanks Spartan3952!

Got it mapped?  Getting a Virtual NES...

Now that you have your wonderful controller working and in good shape, the next step is to go to Virtualnes.com.  This site is actually a Java-based NES emulator,  written by Jamie Sanders.  Once you go there, you'll be greeted by the homepage with the alpha list at the top right.  Pick a letter and go to the big list.

Once you pick a letter, a big list of games will appear in that order.  Click on the name of the game you want to play and it will load.  Once loaded, click on the game with your mouse.  If your keyboard mapper is turned on, you should be able to play the game with your New USB NES Controller!  Congratulations!

Here's mine:

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Comments (1)

• |71.60.121.xxx |2009-05-16 23:20:56 Joy2d
  Another great tutorial Sweet! ide:' title='ide:' class='postemoticon' />
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