Creating an SNES-in-a-controller

[drjayphd]

Continued from this topic in Nintendo 8-bit.

Keyboards nowadays have a small circuit board (usually not much bigger than the Caps, Scroll, and Numlock lights' area, and you can trim off the light segment of the keyboard) and the rest is two mylar sheets under the buttons. The board for the original controller is quite small and doesn't take up much depth, leaving a lot of space for other things.

Hmmm... herein lies the rub. I haven't done any keyboard hacking, nor have I bought the parts (still have unanswered questions, which I shall ask... nnnow). How would I wire that up? Here's my approach:

* Found a USB number pad with two built-in USB ports. If needed and feasible, rotate a USB port after cracking open the number pad so I can stick a flash drive in there at the right angle.
* ???
* PROFIT.

Would I need to leave the original controller board in there? I'm not sure what to make of the buttons inside... here's a pic.



And a close-up...



Do those black pads on the bottom of the buttons (there's identical ones on the L and R buttons, and there's absolutely nothing on the bottom of the board, besides the wires for the cable) just complete the circuit? If that's the case, shouldn't I just be able to wire up the traces to the buttons? Or can I just cut up the pad, if it's a question of traces on Mylar sheets? Like I said, I haven't bought the number pad yet, so that could change things.

Also, does it matter that the flash drive would be plugged into a USB 1.1 port? Both as far as max capacity (if such a beast exists) and speed.

[THON]

From reading Gannons post in the other forums, I can tell you now it would require a lot of fine soldering, coding, and time. I don't even know where to begin in this project, but I sure hope you do

[tom61]

Do those black pads on the bottom of the buttons (there's identical ones on the L and R buttons, and there's absolutely nothing on the bottom of the board, besides the wires for the cable) just complete the circuit? If that's the case, shouldn't I just be able to wire up the traces to the buttons? Or can I just cut up the pad, if it's a question of traces on Mylar sheets? Like I said, I haven't bought the number pad yet, so that could change things.

The black pads do indeed complete the circuit. You'll need to remove the chip from the board. Likely, depending on the keypad, you'll need to break the ground line (the trace going to all the button areas) in places to match up with the matrix inside the keypad. Worse case is that you'll have to break the ground on every button, and run two wires from each button to correct places on the matrix.

Also, does it matter that the flash drive would be plugged into a USB 1.1 port? Both as far as max capacity (if such a beast exists) and speed.

Max capacity is not affected, but speed of loading the emulator and ROMs will be slowed slightly. Not too noticeable, except for some of the larger ROMs. The emulation speed will be unaffected, after the emulator and rom are loaded. Also, Windows XP will complain that you have a USB 2.0 device plugged into a USB 1.1 hub.