Very nice! Quite a different approach than what I had envisioned, but this one would appeal to a larger audience than my Colecovision/Intellivision/etc. concept, what with the NES, SNES, and Genesis being more popular and all. Thanks for giving my idea a shot!
UnderFact Nah, what I'd had in mind was a wired semi-mechanical setup, something closer to an Atari Jaguar controller with a switch to reroute the outputs based on the console it was meant to work with. Ben Heck took it a way different route, but it's still a great build, and something I wouldn't mind having at all. :)
What kind of language doesn't include bitwise operators? An extensible embeddable language, a tiny skeleton language which can be extended by modules written in C. So yes, there's an extension for that. But the firmware that these guys use apparently doesn't have it compiled in. There's this problem, that WiFi and Bluetooth microcontrollers run highly proprietary code that proprietors don't want you getting your hands on. You refers to the likes of people who haven't sold their soul to numerous devils, and haven't signed a legally binding NDA with a huge penalty attached. Now, ESP8266 isn't even bad in this regard, you get to compile software for it, even though the core is closed, but it's still a huge pain in the butt, because basically nobody along the line gives a damn. It could be worse, you could be paying $3000 for a pretty terrible compiler to begin with. So yeah, i can see why they went with a prebuilt firmware. In general the whole project is a bit of a massive WTF. I mean, sure, the ESP isn't expensive, that's a good start. But WiFi is just the wrong transport, it's not all too resilient, it tends to pile up latency whenever there's interference. Certainly, you're always going to have interference issues on wireless, but channel hopping (actually more like spread spectrum over the entire license-free band) transports like Bluetooth and the like actually behave better in this regard. Then he starts botching a dozen of 74 logic ICs around and wondering what he wired up wrong time and time again, when all it would take was a good micro with sufficient number of pins, like an atmega, you get them on these tiny boards for $2, and with a bit of planning, that becomes a lot less painful. For transport, a good companion is nRF24L01, and yes it's a channel hopping one. And an atmega is simply not painful to deal with, the tools are mature.
To the non-programmers, this may seem like a critical nitpick, but bitwise operations are extremely extremely useful (read: almost necessary) in programming. Reading game old game controllers, for example, was literally done using bitwise logic (and for good reason). The states of each button were simply strung into a single byte (8 bits) or word (16 bits) in memory for easy access. With bitwise logic, you can simply check any bit, which coresponds to a single button. Without it, you are forced to check every single possible combination of buttons, which is exponentially larger than the total number of buttons on the controller: Controller | Buttons | # of bitwise checks | # of non-bitwise checks --------------------+-----------------+-----------------------------------+----------------------------------------- NES | 6 | 6 | 64 (2^6) SNES | 12 | 12 | 4,096 (2^12) Genesis | 10 or 13 | 10 or 13 | 1,024 or 8,192 (2^10 or 2^13) Playstation | 14 | 14 | 16,384 (2^14) I think it is easy to see which method is better, especially when the number of combinations you would need to check for the basic NES controller is more than double the number buttons even modern controllers have, and each additional button doubles that amount. Sure, bitwise operations can be simulated using other methods, but why would any programming language not include them? That would be sort of like selling a car with a one-speed transmission: sure, it technically works, but it is severely limiting.
I literally spit my drink out at the "GIVE ME GENESIS!!!" bit. I'm quite a fan of Star Trek III, and that line in the Christopher Lloyd voice was just excellent. Too bad Ben didn't do a Shatnerism with "I. Have had. Enough. Of. YOUUUUUUUU!".
Seriously, this is something I've been aching for. I could never find a proper genesis solution that still felt right on anything outside of genesis. This looks like it'd be the answer to my dreams.
Oh my god, I remember playing Sunset Riders on the arcade when I was a boy and I loved it. I never knew the name of the game and I certainly did not know that it was available for SNES! Thanks so much for mentioning this game :D.
Hey Ben, Dunno if you have checked into this since this is year + old, but you could smooth the buttons using acetone vapor. Just put a bit of acetone into cloth with the buttons and place them under a glass bowl. The vapor will slowly melt the components giving them a sheen.
i actually was working on a ps2 fightstick made out of a gutted dualshock 2 controller and spare happ joysticks and buttons, i just keep getting inspired to build new types of controllers thanks to this
This would be a dream come true! What a great suggestion. The project turned out great! Nice work! I wonder if Ninjaflex on the buttons would have helped. I'd love to see this project/concept revisited in the future. Thanks for an entertaining video!
Would love to see a Kickstarter Campaign for a board to replace the original SNES Controller board to make it wireless. So that in the end I would have a Original SNES Controller with Bluetooth.
I'm more of a programmer than a hardware engineer but I love the show and am always so interested in all of your projects. I just wish I understood alot more of what was going on
Neat solution using string reading rather than direct memory access to overcome limited coding knowledge for that particular script (Lua). I've got a buddy at college who made an entire computer network simulation he scripted for Minecraft in Lua.
When i was a kid I made an atari joystick just with five momentary push buttons. My brother discovered that if you press up and down at the same time in ms pacman you get stuck in a wall.
This is cool! The one thing on my electronics to do list I want to make is a controller that can work with a Colecovision, Intellivision, Emerson Arcardia 2001, Atari 5200, and Atari Jaguar... as well as Atari 7800, Atari 2600, and Genesis.
this is cool! I once built a pinball controller cabinet out of a snes controller, a genesis controller, a large speaker box, bottle caps and wire coat hangers for Super Pinball: Behind the Mask and Crew Ball
Do you post the full build instructions for any of things like this? I'd be interested to try doing something like this - and from the information I could gather it'd be fun to figure out a second one to do other systems with.
YES!!!!! I was working on something similar just recently. I have become very comfortable using the NodeMCUs under the Arduino IDE. Do you think that this project could be shifted away from LUA and into the Arduino IDE? Also, I think this project is screaming for a new portable video game emulation system: wireless controller and separate screen/pi combo!
awesome video! love the retro game themed projects. I'm just getting into snes repro carts and would love a concise but thorough guide to all the various eprom options, so few comprehensive videos out there. Also I've just discovered the MidiNes " hardware / cartridge interface (game) that enables MIDI control of the 8bit NES sound chip" I would love to see a snes version! Thats a project I would love to try.
Have you guys ever tried making a silicon casting from a 3D print (like with buttons)? So print off the part, sand it smooth, making a casting then replicate it. It might be cool to have a few castings for buttons just sitting around, so instead of having to 3D print ones all the time you could just use some epoxy or even silicone and make new ones.
Max's voice saying letter names was ominous. I'm listening with earbuds and I can hear some echo in the background. Nothing to really worry about though.
hey Ben! just found out about you and i´m already in love with your projects! i just have a small little question, what´s the little display you use when you were tying the console in the workshop? thank you and keep up the good work!
"Play one of 15 Genesis games that used 6 buttons." Kinda true for published games. However, there are homebrews and hacks that use the 6 button controller. I have a custom made Sonic game known as Sonic Classic Heroes (I think...) and that game supports 3 players simultaneous. It also uses a 6 button controller as the X button is assigned. Best part of the game is it works on original hardware. You get 3 players with the classic Genesis 4 way taps that plug 4 controllers into port 1. I have all that plus a flash cart. Had my cousins over some time back so I set the system up on a real Genesis for 3 way play. It all worked although the X button was not used since we had 3 players. Look the game up for anyone wondering what I'm talking about with 6 button controllers, port expanders, and 3 way play on original console with a custom Genesis game. It was fun even though we argued over where to go with the 3 characters on same screen. lol
I have always wondered if there was a good 8 way D-pad. Like a 8-way that you could still do plenty of the street fighter 2 special moves. There were plenty of isometric games which where a pain to deal with unless you tilted the controller by 45 degrees and that was still a pain.
Via the Genesis controller. The Genesis uses the same pin config as the Atari controller (specifically, its 'B' button acts as the action button,) so in theory any system that supports Atari input joysticks (2600, 7800, many C64/ZX games, and so on) can use that output. It's a quick and dirty way to get multiple retro system compatibility out of a single connection, and is part of what inspired my original concept.
Guerilla Grue Plays good point. Brings back memories of me playing Tales in Sonic 2 with a joystick meant for an Atari 2600. Good times. (I got my cousin to play as player one with a proper Genesis gamepad on controller port 1, but I had a 2600 controller plugged into controller port 2. Since Sonic 2 only used one button, it worked pretty well).
I think Genesis actually has a bunch of controller compatibility problems even among official controllers. Aside from 6-button and 3-button controllers, they were also meant to be backwards compatible with Master System (which only had a D-pad and 2 buttons). And the odd 3-button game which doesn't work with 6-button controllers even in BC mode (Forgotten Worlds was a world forgotten even by Sega testers, so I hear, you just die instantly with a 6B controller).
Ben, what kind of degree do you need to do these sorts of things? I am currently studying for a degree in physics but am considering changing it to something that would allow me to design and invent things like this.
I read a bit about nes/snes controller, and the system sends a clock signal and scans the state of the buttons to determine wich ones are press.,.. something like that, but Ben didn't mention any of that, am confused =..(
If you can get feedback of the video screen on a smart phone without lag while playing with the retro controller from another room, it could be a way to bring those retro consoles mobile! Very very cool project and end result! You could sell this. *thumbs up* If you want some project ideas take a look at Raphnet, a guy I found online from here in Canada.
When I was in tenth grade, I made an atari paddle controller out of parts from an RCA portable record player. Instead of a button, it had a sort of lightswitch-type thing, and the potentiometer was oddly sensitive towards one way. Atleast it was better than the controller I made in 9th grade, which was made of aluminum foil and cardstock.
Lua is a very strange choice of language, it is good for event-driven systems, but I would recommend using C in this case. Using C would fix a lot of the latency problems, and I suspect that some of the latency is caused by Ben/Felix being unfamiliar with an event-based language like Lua. It looks like Ben/Felix used the ESPlorer IDE, and this also supports MicroPython. In summary, a lot of pain was caused by insisting on using Lua for no good reason. It also gives Lua a bad press, it is actually a very nice language to use on the ESP.
Were you sure it was the controller and not the tv? (Forgive me for asking. I feel like it is the wireless to a degree, but I wanted to ask to make sure)
Ben is there an easy way to create an adaptor to allow a snes controller to be used on a PC engine? I would love something like that so that the 8 bit do snes retro receiver could be used on the PC engine. There are no stellar options for controllers on that console and the arcade sticks for it are very pricey and worn.
Dumb question: If you plug the adapter into two systems at once, for example into the Genesis and the SNES would the controller work with both systems at once?
i need a usb controller with a similar layout to this. 6 buttons with shoulders.. the saturn controller has that but is missing a select button! want it for a retropi build.
Ben Heck drinking game: take a shot every time Ben says "Shift Register". Enjoy.
¡I'm Punk In Drublic!
I can't pour fast enough.
That might actually be deadly.
That sheems liikkeee a gggood iddedfsoijmoigfda
no problem! (5 minutes later i end up upside down in a dumpster with "i love ben" tattooed on my butt)
Very nice! Quite a different approach than what I had envisioned, but this one would appeal to a larger audience than my Colecovision/Intellivision/etc. concept, what with the NES, SNES, and Genesis being more popular and all. Thanks for giving my idea a shot!
You're welcome. It was a great idea! Thanks for submitting it on the element14 Community!
Guerilla Grue Plays so you were probably thinking of something like the 8bitdo
UnderFact
Nah, what I'd had in mind was a wired semi-mechanical setup, something closer to an Atari Jaguar controller with a switch to reroute the outputs based on the console it was meant to work with. Ben Heck took it a way different route, but it's still a great build, and something I wouldn't mind having at all. :)
I was disappointed by how this episode was nothing like your idea.
All I got from the first 5 minutes was:
Shift registers.
get out reddit, get out
REEEEEEEEEEEEEE
allluckyseven I ❤ shift registers
what kind of language doesn't have bitwise operator?
Khandar William German.
(Yeah I know what you meant.)
Moreover, who in their right mind would use a language that does not have a bitwise operator for programming a microcontroller?
What kind of language doesn't include bitwise operators? An extensible embeddable language, a tiny skeleton language which can be extended by modules written in C. So yes, there's an extension for that. But the firmware that these guys use apparently doesn't have it compiled in.
There's this problem, that WiFi and Bluetooth microcontrollers run highly proprietary code that proprietors don't want you getting your hands on. You refers to the likes of people who haven't sold their soul to numerous devils, and haven't signed a legally binding NDA with a huge penalty attached. Now, ESP8266 isn't even bad in this regard, you get to compile software for it, even though the core is closed, but it's still a huge pain in the butt, because basically nobody along the line gives a damn. It could be worse, you could be paying $3000 for a pretty terrible compiler to begin with. So yeah, i can see why they went with a prebuilt firmware.
In general the whole project is a bit of a massive WTF. I mean, sure, the ESP isn't expensive, that's a good start. But WiFi is just the wrong transport, it's not all too resilient, it tends to pile up latency whenever there's interference. Certainly, you're always going to have interference issues on wireless, but channel hopping (actually more like spread spectrum over the entire license-free band) transports like Bluetooth and the like actually behave better in this regard. Then he starts botching a dozen of 74 logic ICs around and wondering what he wired up wrong time and time again, when all it would take was a good micro with sufficient number of pins, like an atmega, you get them on these tiny boards for $2, and with a bit of planning, that becomes a lot less painful. For transport, a good companion is nRF24L01, and yes it's a channel hopping one. And an atmega is simply not painful to deal with, the tools are mature.
Always a critic.
To the non-programmers, this may seem like a critical nitpick, but bitwise operations are extremely extremely useful (read: almost necessary) in programming.
Reading game old game controllers, for example, was literally done using bitwise logic (and for good reason). The states of each button were simply strung into a single byte (8 bits) or word (16 bits) in memory for easy access. With bitwise logic, you can simply check any bit, which coresponds to a single button. Without it, you are forced to check every single possible combination of buttons, which is exponentially larger than the total number of buttons on the controller:
Controller | Buttons | # of bitwise checks | # of non-bitwise checks
--------------------+-----------------+-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------------
NES | 6 | 6 | 64 (2^6)
SNES | 12 | 12 | 4,096 (2^12)
Genesis | 10 or 13 | 10 or 13 | 1,024 or 8,192 (2^10 or 2^13)
Playstation | 14 | 14 | 16,384 (2^14)
I think it is easy to see which method is better, especially when the number of combinations you would need to check for the basic NES controller is more than double the number buttons even modern controllers have, and each additional button doubles that amount.
Sure, bitwise operations can be simulated using other methods, but why would any programming language not include them? That would be sort of like selling a car with a one-speed transmission: sure, it technically works, but it is severely limiting.
Can I just say how much i love when ben has to do his own music and sound effect for games
26:45 "Cause everything smaller is better, right?". That's what she said :P
I'd have included vibration in that thing.
You guys are the nerds I wish I was.
Saw the preview on Facebook, and I knew I had to sub.
Can't wait to see what else you guys create.
I literally spit my drink out at the "GIVE ME GENESIS!!!" bit. I'm quite a fan of Star Trek III, and that line in the Christopher Lloyd voice was just excellent. Too bad Ben didn't do a Shatnerism with "I. Have had. Enough. Of. YOUUUUUUUU!".
Seriously, this is something I've been aching for. I could never find a proper genesis solution that still felt right on anything outside of genesis. This looks like it'd be the answer to my dreams.
Oh my god, I remember playing Sunset Riders on the arcade when I was a boy and I loved it. I never knew the name of the game and I certainly did not know that it was available for SNES! Thanks so much for mentioning this game :D.
Hey Ben, Dunno if you have checked into this since this is year + old, but you could smooth the buttons using acetone vapor. Just put a bit of acetone into cloth with the buttons and place them under a glass bowl. The vapor will slowly melt the components giving them a sheen.
That is so cool, Ben has an amazing amount of ingenuity.
i actually was working on a ps2 fightstick made out of a gutted dualshock 2 controller and spare happ joysticks and buttons, i just keep getting inspired to build new types of controllers thanks to this
I took off my glasses to clean them, put them back on at 3:55 and all I saw was a board summoning a spaghetti monster to attack the console.
0:53 Commodore in the house! Woot! Woot!
for the top piece, I would reprint with a ridge around the side so the pretty plate sits flush inside across the top
This would be a dream come true! What a great suggestion. The project turned out great! Nice work! I wonder if Ninjaflex on the buttons would have helped. I'd love to see this project/concept revisited in the future. Thanks for an entertaining video!
You should make a console that plays all Nintendo games from NES up to the Nintendo Switch without emulation! That would be cool
that actually came out really really well
I see that Uniball vision on your desk. Just a random pen, or are you like me, Mr. Heck? My favorite workshop pen for almost 20 years.
Would love to see a Kickstarter Campaign for a board to replace the original SNES Controller board to make it wireless.
So that in the end I would have a Original SNES Controller with Bluetooth.
i go to sleep watching the ben heck show every night.
I'm more of a programmer than a hardware engineer but I love the show and am always so interested in all of your projects. I just wish I understood alot more of what was going on
Neat solution using string reading rather than direct memory access to overcome limited coding knowledge for that particular script (Lua). I've got a buddy at college who made an entire computer network simulation he scripted for Minecraft in Lua.
5:01 "We can use use with the ESP8266 module." ?
When i was a kid I made an atari joystick just with five momentary push buttons. My brother discovered that if you press up and down at the same time in ms pacman you get stuck in a wall.
If I wanted to learn what any of this techno talk actually means or how to do stuff like this myself where would be a good place to start?
You could read and post to the element14 Community! bit.ly/1LHp3PW
EEVblog on TH-cam is very good to watch. He will go into it more technical details.
This is cool! The one thing on my electronics to do list I want to make is a controller that can work with a Colecovision, Intellivision, Emerson Arcardia 2001, Atari 5200, and Atari Jaguar... as well as Atari 7800, Atari 2600, and Genesis.
In terms of aesthetics - this is one of the best "third party" controllers I have ever seen.
this is cool! I once built a pinball controller cabinet out of a snes controller, a genesis controller, a large speaker box, bottle caps and wire coat hangers for Super Pinball: Behind the Mask and Crew Ball
Do you post the full build instructions for any of things like this? I'd be interested to try doing something like this - and from the information I could gather it'd be fun to figure out a second one to do other systems with.
Ben you should use existing buttons and dpads. Find old worn out/broken controllers and get the buttons from them
its a damn shame this will never go into production. please kickstart
Ben, for the love of god, make these and sell them, I'd buy one! I'm not electronic gifted at doing stuff like this.
I also lack the $ :|
But you'd buy the controller? errr...
To build it would cost too much, I'd need a 3d printer for case, components, a aduino board, some brains, and who knows what else.
Is the source code for his input manager available?
Money's not a problem. Just learn Ohm's Law, then download a free electronics simulator for your computer.
It looks really nice! I do see myself buying it.
It reminded me a cross between an NES controller with a Gravis gamepad.
Did you try the Arduino Core for ESP8266? It lets you program in C. Lua is really confusing!
The Sega CD version of Eternal Champions is the best fighting game EVER! ;)
love one of these for my retro pi!!! Need to be for sale!! Great Job!!!
Good job with the details and description in the comments.
YES!!!!! I was working on something similar just recently. I have become very comfortable using the NodeMCUs under the Arduino IDE. Do you think that this project could be shifted away from LUA and into the Arduino IDE? Also, I think this project is screaming for a new portable video game emulation system: wireless controller and separate screen/pi combo!
Did you include the "Mode" button for the Genesis?
After looking at all that code, I realized I’m definitely more of a hardware person.
awesome video! love the retro game themed projects. I'm just getting into snes repro carts and would love a concise but thorough guide to all the various eprom options, so few comprehensive videos out there. Also I've just discovered the MidiNes " hardware / cartridge interface (game) that enables MIDI control of the 8bit NES sound chip" I would love to see a snes version! Thats a project I would love to try.
wow that's a pretty sweet controller! even though that does seem like overkill that the signal goes 100 feet away but.... still pretty awesome!!
Step by Step. Patrick Duffy is an underratedly interesting person. I always liked that show. Couldn't always actually stomach it, but liked it.
Where can one post suggestions for future builds?
Here is the best place> bit.ly/2eGOkP6
What was the material you used for the front panel and what was the spray??
What type of static shift register are you using for the controller inputs?
I want to see the finished receiver...
Have you guys ever tried making a silicon casting from a 3D print (like with buttons)? So print off the part, sand it smooth, making a casting then replicate it. It might be cool to have a few castings for buttons just sitting around, so instead of having to 3D print ones all the time you could just use some epoxy or even silicone and make new ones.
Max's voice saying letter names was ominous. I'm listening with earbuds and I can hear some echo in the background. Nothing to really worry about though.
Gus Johnnson I think they dubbed over it later bc it was quiet in the original recording
Chris Tone That would make sense.
I realize this is a year old so the tool may not exist, but at 4:41 What software are we using?
What filament did you use for the enclosure?
You didn't make this CD32 compatible.
Intellivision and ColecoVision support would also be cool!
hey Ben! just found out about you and i´m already in love with your projects!
i just have a small little question, what´s the little display you use when you were tying the console in the workshop?
thank you and keep up the good work!
Did you ever work out the lag issues?
"Play one of 15 Genesis games that used 6 buttons." Kinda true for published games. However, there are homebrews and hacks that use the 6 button controller. I have a custom made Sonic game known as Sonic Classic Heroes (I think...) and that game supports 3 players simultaneous. It also uses a 6 button controller as the X button is assigned. Best part of the game is it works on original hardware. You get 3 players with the classic Genesis 4 way taps that plug 4 controllers into port 1. I have all that plus a flash cart. Had my cousins over some time back so I set the system up on a real Genesis for 3 way play. It all worked although the X button was not used since we had 3 players. Look the game up for anyone wondering what I'm talking about with 6 button controllers, port expanders, and 3 way play on original console with a custom Genesis game. It was fun even though we argued over where to go with the 3 characters on same screen. lol
What version of Lua were you using? Because it's had a bitwise operations library since 5.2.
I have always wondered if there was a good 8 way D-pad. Like a 8-way that you could still do plenty of the street fighter 2 special moves. There were plenty of isometric games which where a pain to deal with unless you tilted the controller by 45 degrees and that was still a pain.
What was Ben spraying in the lasercutter?
What version of Lua is on those things? Not 5.2 with the bit32 library?
Where was the Atari / C=64 compatibility? 😔
Via the Genesis controller. The Genesis uses the same pin config as the Atari controller (specifically, its 'B' button acts as the action button,) so in theory any system that supports Atari input joysticks (2600, 7800, many C64/ZX games, and so on) can use that output. It's a quick and dirty way to get multiple retro system compatibility out of a single connection, and is part of what inspired my original concept.
They never tested it, but you can use a Genesis controller on both Atari and C64. So this should work fine!
Guerilla Grue Plays good point. Brings back memories of me playing Tales in Sonic 2 with a joystick meant for an Atari 2600. Good times.
(I got my cousin to play as player one with a proper Genesis gamepad on controller port 1, but I had a 2600 controller plugged into controller port 2. Since Sonic 2 only used one button, it worked pretty well).
There's only one issue: the Atari 7800 actually read two different pinouts for each side, so unless you actually set that up it's not 7800 compatible.
There was! I don't know which Atari controller I had, but I used to plug it into my C64 and play many games with it back in day!
Any idea if you'll do another portable pi video using the zero 1.3?
When the range is so good, can you turn down the power to save battery?
For a future episode idea: Any chance on taking the Nintendo Switch concept and making your own based off a Windows Tablet?
I think Genesis actually has a bunch of controller compatibility problems even among official controllers. Aside from 6-button and 3-button controllers, they were also meant to be backwards compatible with Master System (which only had a D-pad and 2 buttons). And the odd 3-button game which doesn't work with 6-button controllers even in BC mode (Forgotten Worlds was a world forgotten even by Sega testers, so I hear, you just die instantly with a 6B controller).
what is that super small monitor you have???
this was really awesome you should make these and sell them this is really nice
Can't wait for his teardown of a Nintendo Switch!
You can use the sdk and write firmware that way. I didn't like lua myself. You can even do it in Arduino IDE.
Ben, what kind of degree do you need to do these sorts of things? I am currently studying for a degree in physics but am considering changing it to something that would allow me to design and invent things like this.
what happened to the commodore/atari/etc interface? Victim of editing?
I like how a wireless chip is designated "ESP"
Those of us (me) who are not engineers are just scratching ours temples during build explanation, and muttering, "sure, uh huh!"
Where did you buy that shirt in the beginning of the video. I want one
any link to the lua scripts the 2 esp8266's run?
complete wiring diagram?
Hey Ben you can also use Arduino to program the ESP8266. Might make it a little more easy to program.
Damn, that’s a pretty controller.
It's funny because he's the only person to ever use that module for something other than a modded PS4.
Why not replace the 3 game console boxes with a Pi + Lakka?
I read a bit about nes/snes controller, and the system sends a clock signal and scans the state of the buttons to determine wich ones are press.,.. something like that, but Ben didn't mention any of that, am confused =..(
Why didn't you use the tray-loading Nintendo game system for testing NES?
If you can get feedback of the video screen on a smart phone without lag while playing with the retro controller from another room, it could be a way to bring those retro consoles mobile!
Very very cool project and end result! You could sell this. *thumbs up* If you want some project ideas take a look at Raphnet, a guy I found online from here in Canada.
Shoulda tried using the Espruino firmware on the ESP8266
When I was in tenth grade, I made an atari paddle controller out of parts from an RCA portable record player. Instead of a button, it had a sort of lightswitch-type thing, and the potentiometer was oddly sensitive towards one way. Atleast it was better than the controller I made in 9th grade, which was made of aluminum foil and cardstock.
Sooo why not use the arduino core for it?
Lua is a very strange choice of language, it is good for event-driven systems, but I would recommend using C in this case. Using C would fix a lot of the latency problems, and I suspect that some of the latency is caused by Ben/Felix being unfamiliar with an event-based language like Lua. It looks like Ben/Felix used the ESPlorer IDE, and this also supports MicroPython. In summary, a lot of pain was caused by insisting on using Lua for no good reason. It also gives Lua a bad press, it is actually a very nice language to use on the ESP.
Were you sure it was the controller and not the tv? (Forgive me for asking. I feel like it is the wireless to a degree, but I wanted to ask to make sure)
Where can I buy one this??:P
Ben is there an easy way to create an adaptor to allow a snes controller to be used on a PC engine? I would love something like that so that the 8 bit do snes retro receiver could be used on the PC engine. There are no stellar options for controllers on that console and the arcade sticks for it are very pricey and worn.
Dumb question: If you plug the adapter into two systems at once, for example into the Genesis and the SNES would the controller work with both systems at once?
now we need a wireless arcade controller for snes, genesis and nes
Ben can you make a video on how to make a simple controller for retropie?
So sunset riders is basicly Contra with a western theme. Try the cheat code and see if it works too.
his shirt is great alone..... Subcribed!
i need a usb controller with a similar layout to this. 6 buttons with shoulders.. the saturn controller has that but is missing a select button! want it for a retropi build.
are you willing to sell this??
The Genesis Device!!!
mewimi
Genethith?
Planet Forbidden!
Why LUA? You can program the esp8266 using the Arduino IDE in C/C++. There is also micro Python too!