AtmaWeapon
07-06-2002, 11:32 PM
Here's the details of my day, which will explain the title...
I woke up late, ate a piece of pizza for breakfast. I played Earthbound Zero, a ROM *gasp* that I recieved from a benefactor I will not reveal ;). I started thinking about my controller project, building a SNES to parallel adapter. The only thing I really needed was a female SNES port, the kind you plug a controller into. I figured I'd have to pay the $8 to get an SNES extension cord off of eBay. I dug around in my box of Nintendo stuff, and found something I forgot about: the Tyco Power Plug! You plugged any controller into the Power Plug, and it would give that controller turbo, and even let you program button sequences! Best of all, it had a female SNES port on it! I disassembled the power plug, and found that the port had rather long wires connecting it to the board.
I knew I had what I needed, so I left for Radio Shack in search of germainium diodes. Radio Shack was fresh out, and apparently I wanted a catalog-only item, so I just bought some solder and desoldering braid and went back home. I desoldered the port from the power plug, and decided I would try silicon diodes just in case. I left for Radio Shack, and I bought the diodes and a new tip for my soldering iron, because my old one was awful looking.
I got back home, and I was very angry when the new tip didn't fit in my soldering iron. I accidentally broke the iron while trying to make it fit. Later, I figured out I had a 25-watt iron and bought a 30-watt tip, but that's a different story. I went to Radio Shack a third time to buy a new, 40-watt soldering iron.
30 minutes of construction later, I plugged my adapter into the computer, and plugged my lucky controller (one of the original ones I got packaged with the system!) into the adapter. I ran the test program and everything looked alright. I installed DirectPad Pro, the program you can run console controllers with, and it worked!!! I played and played and played all my ROMs, and it works wonderfully!
If you are interested, I found a good mirror (http://www.arcadecontrols.com/Mirrors/www.ziplabel.com/dpadpro/nes.html) of the original directpad pro website, which seems to have disappeared. It has the schematics to make adapters for:
NES
SNES
Playstation (both normal and dual shock)
Saturn
Atari
SMS
TurboGraFX
Genesis
Jaguar
Virtual Boy
N64, but the link to the schematic seems to be broken. I'm sure it can be found elsewhere.
You have to be relatively good with electronics to build these circuits. You have to be able to read a simple schematic (I managed to find a good walkthrough of the SNES circuit at http://snespad.emulationworld.com), and you also need to know your way around a soldering iron, but trust me, it's SO worth it if you play emulated games a lot!
I woke up late, ate a piece of pizza for breakfast. I played Earthbound Zero, a ROM *gasp* that I recieved from a benefactor I will not reveal ;). I started thinking about my controller project, building a SNES to parallel adapter. The only thing I really needed was a female SNES port, the kind you plug a controller into. I figured I'd have to pay the $8 to get an SNES extension cord off of eBay. I dug around in my box of Nintendo stuff, and found something I forgot about: the Tyco Power Plug! You plugged any controller into the Power Plug, and it would give that controller turbo, and even let you program button sequences! Best of all, it had a female SNES port on it! I disassembled the power plug, and found that the port had rather long wires connecting it to the board.
I knew I had what I needed, so I left for Radio Shack in search of germainium diodes. Radio Shack was fresh out, and apparently I wanted a catalog-only item, so I just bought some solder and desoldering braid and went back home. I desoldered the port from the power plug, and decided I would try silicon diodes just in case. I left for Radio Shack, and I bought the diodes and a new tip for my soldering iron, because my old one was awful looking.
I got back home, and I was very angry when the new tip didn't fit in my soldering iron. I accidentally broke the iron while trying to make it fit. Later, I figured out I had a 25-watt iron and bought a 30-watt tip, but that's a different story. I went to Radio Shack a third time to buy a new, 40-watt soldering iron.
30 minutes of construction later, I plugged my adapter into the computer, and plugged my lucky controller (one of the original ones I got packaged with the system!) into the adapter. I ran the test program and everything looked alright. I installed DirectPad Pro, the program you can run console controllers with, and it worked!!! I played and played and played all my ROMs, and it works wonderfully!
If you are interested, I found a good mirror (http://www.arcadecontrols.com/Mirrors/www.ziplabel.com/dpadpro/nes.html) of the original directpad pro website, which seems to have disappeared. It has the schematics to make adapters for:
NES
SNES
Playstation (both normal and dual shock)
Saturn
Atari
SMS
TurboGraFX
Genesis
Jaguar
Virtual Boy
N64, but the link to the schematic seems to be broken. I'm sure it can be found elsewhere.
You have to be relatively good with electronics to build these circuits. You have to be able to read a simple schematic (I managed to find a good walkthrough of the SNES circuit at http://snespad.emulationworld.com), and you also need to know your way around a soldering iron, but trust me, it's SO worth it if you play emulated games a lot!